jeremyjh

Please point me to the paper about the coding model that can continuously learn.

Oh my that is convincing. Yes, I've seen lots of this sort of thing. I believe you, a Twitter influencer is behind it. AI building AI systems for AI to build AI systems with.

Who are the people who are responsibly writing all this test code but declare loudly on Twitter that no one needs to read the production code?

Name one. Point me to one developer that actually works - themselves, not just in the same company - on a system with serious customers that demand correctness and is spreading that message on Twitter.

AI can absolutely improve the situation. It has helped find and fix bugs I have despaired of ever fixing. But it cannot learn, and it cannot understand things for you. And people outsourcing all their understanding to it absolutely could lead to existential disaster for a system at the heart of the platform. Coding agents write too much code and ignore existing patterns. This has been studied quite seriously and they generally write 2.5x the amount of code a human does when refactoring or enhancing code in a real project. When a very large system slips past a critical point of decoherence you really cannot put any certain boundaries on what kind of problems become possible or how long it may take to fix them.

Yes, there are responsible engineers using AI in innovate ways and making things both more productive and better. But there are A LOT of lazy executives, and lazy developers who are spewing a lot of slop all over the place.

Its already happening to classic infrastructure, small and medium size businesses. Absolutely anyone can summon a gremlin capable of exploiting stuff like this or the PHP thing last week. There are clankers probing this stuff all over the place within a day of it going public.

Good ones force themselves to do technical work hands on regularly, but will generally reach a level where they can't actually do that anymore unless they are really good at building management systems and delegating. For me it has happened in cycles over the last 25 years; after 4-6 years in management I refresh skills and go back to an IC role because I can't stand it anymore. I've done that cycle three times but I won't do it quite the same way again because its probably impossible to do without a pay cut now, and because IC don't write code anymore anyway.

This is both like forcing all IC to develop management skills but its also like the shift to cloud infrastructure or 4GL languages - we are never going back to the old ways and will be building everything at a different level of abstraction with a different span of control.

Bunny is not a CA and doesn’t have those keys.

The problem is that people go on Twitter and see the posts from "thought leaders" and "influencers" who say things like "reading the code is not needed". Those people are not working on systems that have paying customers who would cancel their subscription - or worse - if the software became too defective or unreliable.

You only need a handful of occasions of creating massive billing errors for your customer's customers before they will slag you to all their CTO friends and pull the plug. Imagine Stripe began double-charging every third transaction once a week, and couldn't fix it after two months of thrashing because no one there has any understanding of how anything works anymore. They are simply done at that point, all the value of their brand lost.

This isn't a different thing - it is just one of techniques used, and it still requires humans to understand the systems they are building. Teams that outsource their systems understanding to AI will fail, no matter how they frame it.

They can't help but brag about it.