alt Hacker NewsYes, "code rot" is not in any way an AI-unique problem. Codebases like Flash Player or Bethesda Engine have been deep in decay long before AI was capable of contributing to them.
Historically, this was caused by hiring the cheapest developers one can find, having high turnover, outsourcing, pushing to ship at any cost and more. AI just lets you get there faster, and without having to hire bargain bin Indians.
The thing is, today's AI is already far better at "code rot per feature shipped" than the worst of developers - and I struggle to believe that we're at the limit there.
I've already seen benchmarks that test for AI's ability to make incremental changes and tweaks to code continuously - thus, tracking whether earlier changes make the latter changes harder. This makes for a clear target to RL for.
AI is not better nor worse at producing code rot; just faster at it.
AI produced code is a function of the team driving and instructing the agents along with the scaffolding produced by the team (skills, examples, docs, comments); same with human teams.
A team that cannot guide a human team to produce better code will not be able to guide an AI team to produce better code because it's the same skillset: being able to write good docs, create constraints structurally in code, produce core architecture that enforces good behavior.