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Comment by tomwuu | Hacker News Reader

Although code quality may sometimes suffer, no one can deny the productivity gains AI brings to software development.

You absolutely can deny long term productivity gains.

Pre AI it took 100 engineers 5 years to get into a legacy code situation. Once you’re in a legacy code situation it’s very hard to add new features and your code is full of bugs. Fortunately most old companies with legacy code are making loads of money so they can pay the increased development costs to add features to their legacy code.

Now with AI five engineers can build a legacy codebase in six months.

Amateur numbers. I can build a legacy codebase in an afternoon

Why five? What do the other four do?

They go to meetings.

> Although code quality may sometimes suffer

That doesn't sound like a good thing in the long term.

> no one can deny the productivity gains AI brings to software development.

What are those "productivity gains"? Rapidly building hundreds of the wrong things that people do not want?

It means you cannot stop and the competition only moves far more quicker and its a forever race to the bottom.

Neither can anyone deny that 'productivity gains' are worthless if what's being produced is worthless.

If you are producing worthless code, you are choosing that outcome either by choosing to work on worthless projects, or by failing to provide the direction and constraints that cause the model to create performant, maintainable code. You can’t just yolo everything, it’s still software development, but with LLMs it’s more of an engineering and management role.

I do. I deny the "gains". The "gains" will turn out to be a mirage in the medium to long term. The technical and cognitive debt incurred will be too extreme.

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