Code is a liability. What we really care about is the outcome, not the code. These AI tools are great at generating code, but are they good at maintaining the generated code? Not from what I've seen.
So there's a good chance we'll see people using tools to generate a ton of instant legacy code (because nobody in house has ever understood it) which, if it hits production, will require skilled people to figure out how to support it.
This is no different from what we see with any tool or language: the results are highly dependent on the experience and skills of the operator.
In the a world where people are having machines build the entire system, there is potentially no human that has ever understood it. Now, we are talking about a yet unseen future; I have yet to see a real world system that did not have a human driving the design. But, maintaining a system that nobody has ever understood could be ultra-hardmode.
Philosophical question: how is LLM-produced code that nobody has ever understood any different from human-written legacy code that nobody alive today understands?
- There is zero option of paying an obscene amount of money to find the person and make the problem 'go away'
- There is a non-zero possibility that the code is not understandable by any developer you can afford. By this I mean that the system exhibits the desired behavior, but is written in such a way that only someone like Mike Pall* can understand.
* Mike Pall is a robot from the future
Another way I've seen this expressed, which resonates with me, is "All code is technical debt."
This is so true! Actual writing of the code is such a small step in overall running of a typical business/project, and the less of it the better.