alt Hacker News> LLMs, there’s really no excuse
I'd phrase it differently; we're now able to accumulate technical debt faster than ever, without even building the institutional knowable needed to keep it sane. While the models writes novels about what it's doing that no human or LLM will find any use for.
But at the same time; if the LLM makes coding 5-10x faster, there's plenty of left-over time we can now spend doing things properly. Document, test, plan, refactor, lint, use CI tooling. There is no excuse now that LLMs reduce the pain threshold for all of them.
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> we're now able to accumulate technical debt faster than ever
LLM's just enable you to speed run your way into a legacy code base.
> without even building the institutional knowable needed to keep it sane
Does feature XXX move the needle? Did you gain more business or retain existing business because a feature exits? Has AI tooling helped your product team move the needle? No? Why not?
How easy is it to remove the feature that NO ONE uses is a question no one is asking. How many people got promoted for "removing the most garbage" from the system?
We, as an industry, might need to have a candid conversation about what we're doing and how we do it.
And yet technical debt is still much, much worse than it used to be thanks to LLMs.
As a technological innovation theyre a bit like amphetamines for code. Sure, maybe some people are using the "tankers chocolate" their employer handed them responsibly...I guess.
There are certainly a lot of people online who have gone all in who swear blind theyre not abusing them.
From what I've heard, there is no time for any of those things because management also expects features 5-10x faster.