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Comment by keithnz | Hacker News Reader

In my experience AI reduces maintenance costs. Though, context might matter here, I'm working on a multi decade set of projects, while there is a lot of greenfield feature development, the old code / older projects have suddenly become a lot easier to work with, modernize, and in a bunch of cases, eliminated. Dependency on old libraries, build tools, in some cases updated, in other cases just eliminated, builds are faster, easier for developers, etc. End to end testing has become a lot easier to setup and automate. DevOps have been improved a lot, diagnosing production issues drastically improved, we have a ton of logs and information, and while we have various consolidated dashboards / monitoring to capture critical things, now we can do a lot more analysis on our deployed system (~50 ish projects)

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This rings true for me too, but I don't think it counts if your just using AI to aid maintenance. The basic argument in the article is around how many hours of maintenance you have to do for each hour of "value-add" feature development. So A. your only measuring maintenance costs not the ratio and B. The "old code" whp wasn't written with AI in the first place.

True. The critical calculus here is if AI decreases maintaince costs faster than it increases code output (which the article hypothesizes,maintaince costs are proportional too)

I agree - AI makes it easier to wrangle legacy code. I think the author's point is that if you lose access to the AI tools, everything becomes more daunting -- because you've been comfortably moving mountains with heavy equipment, and now it's back to hand tools.

That is true, but if you lost access to modern computers and had to do everything by punchcard you would lose productivity too. I kinda dont like that argument

I have a very very opposite experience in a large company where everyone shits code all over parts of the codebase they don't understand with AI assistance.

We have had outages increase in tandem with lines of code shipped and outages are getting more and more severe. Yes we have improved much old code, deleted more old code, can automate code modernization, can better diagnose issues, have more options for mitigations, etc.

But all that has not offset the sheer magnitude of code being shipped which no one really understood.

Shipping code you don’t understand isn’t really opposite to GP, that’s a different point and more of a “skill issue”.

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