alt Hacker NewsIs it forcing us to "pay off" technical debt or is it starting us on a compulsory endless treadmill of feature-neutral fix-work? Collectively, we just won't know for a while.
It totally feels like the former if you watch it find and fix vulnerabilities or other debt-tasks one after another.
But only so many of these "technical debt" issue are little off-by-one errors that get remedied by a surgically narrow patch.
Many enough require some kind of restructuring or redevelopment of their own and it's going to take time to figure out if AI faces the same dilemma as human developers: where each non-trivial change carries the risk of some new issue, ad infinitum.
If that happens to be the case, and AI isn't able to magically produce perfect software in finite time, then what's really happened is that the threat of hostile AI exploiting our technical debt will force us to always be burning and churning code just to remain a moving target.
It's another "we'll see" thing for now, I think.
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The original technical debt, which cannot be paid off, was the decision to use a Von Neumann architectures instead of a Harvard architectures for CPUs.
Max AI-glazing perspective in the title, as expected. We need to fix bugs that no mere humans could successfully find and exploit. Thankfully we have AI that can fix those bugs that wouldn’t be a problem without superhuman code agents.
But there are potential upsides like the already mentioned possible nation state exploits (sleeper exploits).
the equilibrium state would be having found a good pattern for making patterns good. we probably aren't too far from that, so i think your worry may show up in the short term but not the long one