My thoughts and favorite points of someone else’s writing from the web:
Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
By: Mario Zechner
Mario sums up my fear of the future of AI-written code well here:
“With an orchestrated army of agents, there is no bottleneck, no human pain. These tiny little harmless booboos suddenly compound at a rate that’s unsustainable. You have removed yourself from the loop, so you don’t even know that all the innocent booboos have formed a monster of a codebase. You only feel the pain when it’s too late.
Then one day you turn around and want to add a new feature. But the architecture, which is largely booboos at this point, doesn’t allow your army of agents to make the change in a functioning way. Or your users are screaming at you because something in the latest release broke and deleted some user data.
You realize you can no longer trust the codebase. Worse, you realize that the gazillions of unit, snapshot, and e2e tests you had your clankers write are equally untrustworthy. The only thing that’s still a reliable measure of “does this work” is manually testing the product. Congrats, you fucked yourself (and your company).
But I think it’s going to be slow; take years for companies with large code bases to have enough of their code written by AI and irresponsible engineers that these problems become apparent. “Slop fixing engineer wanted” is going to be a popular job board post.
While your army of AI agents are planing the code, writing the code, commenting on the code, and even responding to comments on the code; do you even know what the code says? How long before your skills atrophy to the point where you lose the ability to actually write it yourself?
“And I would like to suggest that slowing the fuck down is the way to go. Give yourself time to think about what you’re actually building and why. Give yourself an opportunity to say, fuck no, we don’t need this. Set yourself limits on how much code you let the clanker generate per day, in line with your ability to actually review the code.
Well said.