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> An unreadable 100K loc program backed by 50K tests, guaranteeing behavior to the client requirements

Until the next set of needed changes due to exterior requirements. And this software is one of the pillar in the business. That is when you switch vendors if you were buying the service.

That is why support is always an essential part of B2B or even serious B2C. The world will change and you need to react to it, not just have the correct software now.

This assumes software is a thing you build once and seal it off when it's finished.

What happens when you need to modify large portions of it? Fix security issues? Scale it up 20x? You can throw more tokens at it and grow it into a monstrous hulk. What if performance degrades due to its sheer weight?

I know humans aren't perfect and are capable of writing really bad unmaintainable code too, but this is just embracing that more. This feels like going further down the same route of how we ended up with 10MB websites that take many seconds to load. But yeah it will probably win over the market.

> An unreadable 100K loc program backed by 50K tests, guaranteeing behavior to the client requirements. Cost: $50K of API tokens

As my team has spent the past several months trying to explain to upper management, you can't guarantee that the program does what the client wanted just by adding more tests.

If the AIs ever become capable of reliably producing what the client wanted, they will win. But I'm not convinced they will. They might be able to produce what the client asked for, but programmers have known for decades that that's pretty much useless.

// When I wrote this code, only Copilot and I understood what I did. Now only Copilot knows.

> No sufficiently large software system that interacts with the real world is provable to be correct like a mathematical statement is.

People who work in formal verification will either vehemently disagree with you or secretly know you're right.

> guaranteeing behavior to the client requirements

> built by humans, with elegant abstractions

Frankly, I look at both of these options and think I haven't seen either in the wild...

I think the question to ask about your two scenarios: in which is it faster and cheaper to get from v1 to v2? From v2 to v3? I think, for right now, it's cheaper under scenario B. But in the future? Who knows!

> Cost: $50K of API tokens

What? It costs exactly $200