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throwawayffffastoday at 12:28 AM1 replyview on HN

That's legit true. All code is technical debt. Human SWEs have one saving grace. Sometimes they refactor and reduce some of the debt.


Replies

ymymstoday at 12:37 AM

A human SWE can use an LLM to refactor and reduce some of the debt just as easily too. I think fundamentally, the possible rate of new code and new technical debt introduced by LLMs is much higher than a human SWE. Left unchecked, a human still needs sleep and more humans can't be added with more compute.

There's an interesting aspect to the LLM debt being taken on though in that I'm sure some are taking it on now in the bet/hopes that further advancements in LLMs will make it more easily addressable in the future before it is a real problem.