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Comment by endofreach | Hacker News Reader

> I don't know what to think. These blog articles are supposed to be a showcase of engineering expertise, but bragging about having AI vibecode a replacement for a critical part of your system that was questionably designed and costing as much as a fully-loaded FTE per year raises a lot of other questions.

I agree. But most of the time the people responsible for the codebase / architecture do not want those questions raised. AI is greatly appreciated emergency exit for those situations. Apparently.

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> But most of the time the people responsible for the codebase / architecture do not want those questions raised.

I don't know if that matches my experience. I've seen plenty of places where the dev teams complain about tech debt and other kludges costing too much, slowing them down and causing other problems, but management don't want to "waste time re-writing working code".

But now that management read on linkedin they can jump on the AI bandwagon by having the team use AI to fix tech debt, there's suddenly time to work on it.

Eliminating manual toil seems like a huge win for LLMs. There are a ton of straightforward-but-tedious projects that no one wants to fund because they take 2 dev weeks to implement and the result is a hard to quantify quality of codebase improvement. Some of these can now be handled by an LLM in a day and so they suddenly become extremely tractable. You don’t have to embrace vibe coding to benefit from cheap debt pay down.

That's pretty optimistic. First of all, the people who were manually toiling are getting laid off - LLMs aren't exactly making their lives better.

And I'm not talking about cases where an AI can do things faster. We have a few tech debt tickets at work right now where using an AI will take the same amount of time, because the "hard part" isn't writing the code but working with other teams to organize or roll out the changes. But since we can use AI, management is suddenly interested.

It's silly, and I can't wait for the AI bubble to burst.

> First of all, the people who were manually toiling are getting laid off

I was referring to the sort of work that just never gets funded. Cleanup, refactoring.

If you have business critical toil being done by people who now get laid off, that is obviously a cause for concern.

> the "hard part" isn't writing the code but working with other teams to organize or roll out the changes. But since we can use AI, management is suddenly interested.

So AI has convinced your management to let you pay down tech debt? Seems like a win.

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