The cost of code actually increased; code debt is being accumulated faster than we can clean it up.
New tech stacks will appear and they will handle the mess to some extent.
With this and the pipe dream of continuous generation and deployment of code without a human in the loop, I can't even think of a problem it's solving or attempting to solve. The closest thing I can think of is library or language upgrades... but we already have automated solutions for those e.g. codemods and migration scripts.
React has about 3 to 4% of the top 10 million.
[1]: https://www.rocketsoftware.com/en-us/insights/what-is-cobol
Well that's some cherry picking. And really off-topic, because nobody here mentioned COBOL.
If someone were shitting on COBOL here, it would be right to point out that COBOL is still getting the job done at 90% of fortune 500 companies.
I’ve been wondering whether 2006 Google, Amazon, Facebook would be acting like this if LLMs were launched back then, or if these companies are just due for getting replaced and this is just their big mistake making phase. Prior big companies also entered a big mistake making phase, the mistakes just looked different because different era etc.
If your engineers are "wasting time" optimizing artisan code whilst the competition has released their next version, they'll be told to use AI.
The other reality is that by the time you figure out the right abstraction, business has already pivoted, or your feature will be rewritten , or dumped all together. Obviously there are niche industries where this is not the case but in majority of companies, the churn is exhausting.
My point is this: we can shout all we want about "maintenance" and "technical debt", but it's guaranteed to fall on deaf ears.
LLM has validate upper management's assumption that engineering is nothing but a cost center.
I think that our industry is fundamentally shifting.
Imagine a world where those only get done for a business incentive by people with this hard-reality business mindset. Or not done at all, reinvented at every place, no transferable knowledge for developers.