anyonecancode
Joined 7 years ago
Joined 7 years ago
One of the reasons to avoid rewriting has long been that the time spent rewriting code that works is time not spent writing code to meet new business needs. In other words, it's usually a huge opportunity cost, rarely balanced out by sufficient gains to be net positive.
I do think AI does challenge this prior, as the time needed to do a rewrite shrinks dramatically. It's not zero, of course, but it now becomes worth asking if it's worth doing, rather than defaulting to avoiding rewrites in nearly all cases.
The declaration here, as I understand it, is taking the premise that the point of mathematics _is_ the domain knowledge, and that using "solves math problems" as a benchmark is exactly the kind of shallow, domain-eroding approach to AI that in software we label "slop."
So much, of course, depends on the execution -- a crappy city store won't be a help to anyone -- but the concept isn't inherently bad on its face.
[0]https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-barbarous-years-the-peoplin...