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Comment by bunderbunder | Hacker News Reader

If anything I’ve seen AI become a multiplier. The low initial cost to add new features eliminates the only brake many organizations have on accumulation of bloat.

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Laziness is a feature and a very important filter to have in a software engineer. Imagine having in the team a lot of eager (AI) developers that are able to implement in seconds the most overcomplicated or ultimately useless features that will still have to be tested and maintained for years, with no cost-benefit analysis ever made. All it takes is a project manager to have a random idea on a whim, to have to drag it along forevermore.

We're gonna see a bloat epidemic in software like never before.

Perhaps we already are seeing it. I know that we of the orange website get excited at how fast we can churn out work product nowadays. But when the non-tech people in my life have anything to say about it, it’s that they wish it would stop. They see the constant churn as annoying change for the sake of change, and there’s a general sense that lately computers have been getting harder to use.

Spoiler alert: Laziness is one of the most important factors for driving the creation of coherence. We have a deep biological desire to do things faster/better/lazier. Will be digging into this more in Open Capital.

The worst developers to have on your project produce shitty code quickly.

There's also the way AI itself tends to work: In my experience it very rarely refactors existing code when it's adding something new.

AI tends to layer new code on top and you get a steaming mess very quickly if you aren't careful.

I’ve used a harness that had no compunctions about deciding for itself when to refactor existing code. It was not a better experience.

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