alt Hacker News> There are a lot of workplaces where there isn’t a good mechanism to push back on this and the tech debt just keeps growing.
If the "big ball of spaghetti" theory holds, where software companies who can't manage the debt stumble over themselves as they continue to add to the big ball of spaghetti code, I guess we'll see a row of companies declaring "software bankruptcy" or something in some/many months, depending on how well these workspaces learn to care slightly more and get better at pushing back against slop.
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What concerns me the most is that improvements in software design are at an end. The “big ball of mud”, which really is a problem of modularity and dependencies, will never improve through innovation because the way it is done now is all there will ever be.
The problem is that this is just another instance of trusting that "the market will solve all our problems."
But that's based on "spherical economy in a frictionless vacuum" type assumptions.
In the real world, in addition to the problems others have noted of it being hard to identify and fix the specific sources of problems, we have so much consolidation that it doesn't matter if something from any of the tech giants starts getting buggier and slower. What are you* going to do—switch from Windows to Linux, just because it's getting a bit buggy? Or worse, switch away from Banner, or Salesforce?
We cannot depend on "market forces" to prove whether LLM-assisted coding is actually a good idea. We have to push for universal personal accountability for the code we commit (at least internally; I'm not calling for legal liability here!). Which is, unquestionably, going to be a huge uphill slog.
* where "you" in this case is an average PC user, or a large institution
Coding agents have been better than the average "enterprise" programmer for a while now and nobody wants to admit it or talk about it. I have never seen an agent output an implementation called FooImpl that's tens of thousands of LOC in a single file, but I have seen plenty of human code like this.
People call coding agents bad because they don't know the asinine meaningless conventions at their particular company while they themselves write awful abstractions and brittle tightly coupled systems, but hey, at least they know how to write a for loop how their particular company likes.
I guess we'll see a row of companies declaring "software bankruptcy" or something in some/many months
I don't think you will, because that would require the business to recognise the problem. That might happen in companies where the leadership team are engineers but it will never happen if they're not.
Instead you'll see:
- Churn in the dev team with senior developers leaving rather than try to deal with the mess
- Large scale projects to refactor or rewrite entire codebases, which will inevitably fail because you can't rewrite a big ball of spaghetti because you can't tell what it actually does (especially if it's in a language that allows side effects, or you've used a strategy like 'exceptions as flow of control').
- Companies just getting slower and slower to deliver anything. That's probably fine in many cases where they're big enough to still carry on without growing much, but anyone in the company will see their career die and pay rises dry up.
- Eventually, maybe, you'll see 'tech debt fixing' service companies start up to leverage AI in the effort to fix these problems. (AWS have a thing called 'Amazon Modernization Lab' that is exactly that, but only for companies running old tech on their services.)