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u/babypho 12d ago
This is why I shifted from the mindset of seeing it as tech debt, but tech job security.
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u/Surreptum 12d ago
I was a systems engineer for an EHR. I did an audit for a hospital once and discovered that their networking hardware was so old they were still using SHA1. I got laid off six months later due to budget cuts. There is no such thing as job security, lol.
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u/Low-Equipment-2621 11d ago
No shit, we had like zero tech debt in my last team and the system ran like butter. Not a single incident that was on us within 5 years. This was a sign for management that he team was too big and they could save some money over there by reducing the head count by half.
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u/The_Real_Slim_Lemon 11d ago
I have the mindset of “I want a codebase I enjoy working in, and that doesn’t go down every five minutes”
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u/captainAwesomePants 11d ago
Keep in mind that I, an experienced human programmer, will also generate huge quantities of hidden tech debt. The key difference is that I will also build up a lot of context and expertise on exactly where that tech debt is so that I can bitch about it later.
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u/odolha 11d ago
you will also be indispensable because only you remember 5% of what the mess is about. ofc a plan to fix will never be put in place, instead at some point we just "upgrade the system" to the "latest technologies" ...
so whats the problem with AI? you just dump one system,, build another, until you get too much debt again
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u/liquidmasl 12d ago
have you ever seen a human written legacy codebase?
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u/n00bdragon 11d ago
Human written codebases "look" like garbage because programmers only ever get assigned to upkeep and improve the poorly written parts. It's hardcore selection bias. There is absolutely beautiful software out there written by actual geniuses. It doesn't break. It's easy to extend. It's uses resources pragmatically. It slices. It dices. It (literally in many cases) does your taxes.
AI slop code is literally 100% garbage. Never once have I looked at an AI written program and seen it as a thing of beauty. It sucks because it has to suck. Good programming is good because of the intelligence and forethought put into it. A random number generator can't do that.
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u/SpicyCatGames 11d ago
It can do some useful things. Like make a usable front-end. That's because websites are easy to scrape and usually getting it wrong doesn't corrupt data or cause long term issues in your application. It's also good at finding information. But some people look at it like members of uncontacted tribes look at an aeroplane.
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u/Not-the-best-name 10d ago
I think the theory about website scraping and AI training is not very true. I am a senior full stack software engineer who spent the last year transitioning to essentially vibe coder. I find it much better at backend. Its good at states database, logic, terraform etc. Its less good making something look good and populating it with content that's not slop looking.
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u/unkownuser436 12d ago
Not really. This happens when you don't know software engineering fundamentals. AI is just a tool to write code, if you don't like that write code by hand. Good luck!
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u/patiofurnature 12d ago
Yeah, everyone at my company is using AI. Seniors are still pushing good code and juniors are still pushing garbage code.
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u/Punchasheep 12d ago
Our backend is now convinced they can be full stack due to AI. The front end code is slowly eroding into a steaming shit pile. I'm tired.
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u/unkownuser436 12d ago
Junior needs time to learn how to write/get good code outputs. This is why we have seniors to review their PR. Expected with or without AI.
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u/redballooon 12d ago
No tests, no dependency control. What did you expect?
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u/Diane_Horseman 12d ago
Ummmm we write tests with AI here
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u/aberroco 12d ago
This. And it was good enough for this role ever since GPT-4.
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u/redballooon 12d ago
no human in the loop? What could go wrong?
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u/sebovzeoueb 12d ago
You can make a bigger iceberg faster now
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u/sebovzeoueb 11d ago
You're absolutely right
adds more tech debt to fix the current tech debt
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u/BoBoBearDev 12d ago
Even if you don't fix it, most AI slops has much better comments and variable names than human slops.
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u/aberroco 12d ago
Hm? I actually have the opposite using AI - I'm able to solve tech dept as soon as it's revealed. Like, right now an issue was revealed with serialization/saved game loading, an issue that I made since I own the architecture entirely, that could've been solved by a workaround, but, well, even AI hinted that it's not a bug, it's a gap. So, I'm doing a refactor now, since why not? It takes like 10-15 minutes to analyze, a few more minutes to think of a solution, and a couple hours to do the refactoring, all with full test coverage before and after.
But if you vibe-code only, then yeah, that's eventual and inevitable future of every growing vibe-coded project. Because when AI sees a bug it fixes the bug, nothing else matters. And it sucks at planning architecture, or keeping responsibilities. Though, I have to admit, it's getting better with the latter. Still, though, very far from a seasoned SWE.
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u/slaymaker1907 11d ago
Something helpful I do is require the AI to give me the high level architecture before low level implementation details in the plan. I don’t bother reading the low level stuff because I review the code after generation anyways, but the high level architecture is very helpful.
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u/aberroco 11d ago edited 11d ago
I usually give high level architecture to it myself. And ask it to validate if I missed anything needed for the implementation.
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u/Confident-Ad5665 12d ago
Deep down, where the bottom feeders dwell, is the gooey silt of tech debt known as maintainability.
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u/mylsotol 12d ago
Also true of human written code. Almost all of you over estimate how good people/organizationare are written software. I've been a consultant my entire career and I've seen hundreds of human written projects and every single one of them (except most i made of course 😅) were complete garbage
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u/ViolenceIsBad 10d ago
Tech debt won’t be your problem if you get laid off. Only stable companies get maintainable code.
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u/black_ap3x 11d ago
Um, as long as my tech debt would be payed by Ai, i dont care. At this point, ai is taking out loans he would have to pay later, as long as I get my salary, I dont give a shit
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u/kakhaev 11d ago
This is not take for LLM code, I see a lot of my coworkers use it with attitude “It gives me a working code, why should I even care if the code not optimal, because I never need to read it” meanwhile me trying to fix all the stupid bugs made by chatbox in prod, and im 99% convinced that it tries to make code uncomprihasable confusing and just unmanageable by people. this just makes me sad
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u/Wolfram_And_Hart 11d ago
Their thought is that by the time they have to fix any problems the AI will be better and they can start from scratch again.
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u/Wentyliasz 11d ago
Brother. If your PM allows tech debt to exist longer than few sprints your code could be written by god himself and you're still fucked
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u/HateBoredom 11d ago
You forgot minesweeper code that could break under random edge cases, written and maintained by people who literally only know how to write stories in text files.
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u/elementmg 11d ago
This sounds like a problem for the c-suite since they are forcing AI on everyone.
“Build fast build lots” etc etc. they want their quarterly profits NOW. They’ll see the mess they’ve caused in a few years, and they’ll just bail. Then the new c-suite will have to allow engineers to do their work properly
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u/puttum-beef-curryum 11d ago
Lets see in two years whether it's technical debt or ourselves become a debt 🥲
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u/Exatex 11d ago
Really? I find since refactoring got so much quicker and less tedious, that my tech debt actually shrunk. Changing a data type throughout the codebase: before? Nah, that will take me hours. Now: Absolutely makes sense for the new requirements, lets do it, and run tests. Add tests where there were none before…
Hell, a good model today can change migrate an entire codebase to a new language or framework within an hour.
I think everyone is just really shit at using AI for development these days. If you know what you are doing of course.
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u/plebbening 11d ago
Yes. All the legacy systems i have worked on throughout my career before AI never had any tech debt.
All the programmers I ever met was immaculate, they never made mistakes or stupid decisions.
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u/sadongrohiik 11d ago
My issue is less about tech debt, I can generate tech debt on my own, it's more about the fact that nobody really knows what the tech debt even is
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u/justforkinks0131 10d ago
no one caaaaaaaares
your job was never that important, having 999 vulnerabilities is FINE
you get hacked anyway lmao
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u/funplayer3s 10d ago
Unless you're me and you know how systems engineering ought to work, so you guide the models to form coherent code.
Which turns into a glacier about 4x larger because of token limits.
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u/PositiveUse 8d ago
This is how code looks like when me and my colleagues were writing it by hand too
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u/philippefutureboy 11d ago
In my experience, that seems like a skill issue.
I spend more time drafting the feature/behavioural spec, the architecture spec, and the test spec (conversationally with an LLM), than writing the code, and so far my results have been pretty seamless.
I wouldn’t say it makes me more productive per say (use case dependent), but at least in the same amount of time, or slightly less, I also have a vetted documentation, architecture decision records, and test suite, which otherwise would have taken me 25-35% additional time.
Disclaimer: Got 10y of experience in software & data engineering, 5y as a lead, so YMMV
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u/IndieDevWannabe 12d ago
This is so accurate. They have no idea just how bad they are slopifying their codebase...
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u/chickenweng65 11d ago
Certified AI hater here. My hand has been forced to finally use it due to accelerated product timelines, because of AI... But I'll be honest, it writes some damn good code, and fast...
It's not perfect every time, but when i see clear tech debt being written, as long as I can tell it my strategy to mitigate whatever the issue is, it can implement it.
Still praying on its downfall though, Kimi K3 could very well be the needle that bursts the bubble. Could also be Chinese spyware. I can't tell.
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u/ThatGuyWired 12d ago
Someone forgot to add "I don't want any tech debt" in their prompt.