alt Hacker NewsI am shipping so much more, but I don't know that our customers would necessarily know it. Total rewrites that needed to be done but were getting pushed off due to the scope are now getting done. Security issues are getting patched. Support ticket open to resolution time is dropping. So yes, shipping a lot faster to create a much better project rather than just focusing on features.
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do those rewrites really need to be done still? what are you gaining?
In the old days we rewrote for a gain in productivity by humans or a gain in performance which resulted in non-trivial dollars. If AI is writing and testing the code, what benefits are you getting from the rewrite?
> Total rewrites that needed to be done but were getting pushed off
I am doing this now with a massive internal app. Our internal customers see this as a drop-in performance because one of the senior team members, me, is not adding new features. But we are addressing a massive technical debt in about one-fifth the time it would've taken without the use of LLMs.
That’s my immediate thought.
As we’ve seen happening in the open source projects with the piles of bugs being reported to them so much of what’s going on doesn’t seem to be new features, but just longstanding technical debt coming to the fore.
Maybe AI can’t write that new feature for us really fast. Maybe we asked. Maybe the code was complete garbage and it made it clear we really don’t want to keep piling on top of it and need to fix the issues we’ve known about for a long time. Adding new features at the old pace was a problem. We can’t handle the new.
Between that and the fact that some kinds of tech debt are much easier to pay off now that’s where a lot of our “new capacity” is going. Shoring things up.