> Humans have been shipping systems that no one person understands for a long time
Systems of humans have been shipping systems that no one persons can understand. Take the nuclear aircraft, there’s no part on it that you can’t find someone that is accountable for that part. That is why we can still build them and improve on the design.
> So I think that software will be better in a certain way due to AI, because even a terrible developer can ask AI to identify the bottlenecks and solve them.
The root cause of the issue is not the bottlenecks or the ability to identify them. It’s about caring about doing a good job. Because once you start caring, you will need to exercise judgment. Better or worse only matters when you have goals.
This is one reason we have so much slop with AI. The cost of the journey has lessened, but you still need to have a destination and be willing to appreciate the journey to get there. Without, it’s just endless drifting.
> you have a passion for building things that solve problems
The AI hypers are more about “building things” than “solving problems”. When you analyze their comments and projects, they can barely articulate what the project’s purpose is about. Or even if it can be used by somebody else. It’s always about LoC, coding speed, and specs complexity.
I know what you mean, there's definitely a contingent of people super hyped up about AI who seem to be using it to build stuff to build more stuff to build more stuff, and I don't know what actual problem they're trying to solve at the end of the day. But I'm not sure that doesn't mean there's value, like someone building carpentry tools and not actually building anything with them, but building them for others to use?
Regardless, in my case, I build a SaaS app that I sell to real non-technical small businesses in a tiny niche that helps them with a particular problem they face in their business. They don't care that it uses AI, they just need this problem solved at an affordable price so they can focus on other things. This solution that I sell would have been absolutely impossible to provide in an automated way pre-LLM, and I could never have built and grown this business on my own (in this time frame anyway, probably at all) without agentic development.
If it’s B2B, the finance side (seller/customer) of the relationship can be totally different from the product side (developer/user). Evolution of the contract is often measured in quarters.
That’s merely code churn, which is not a good property. What you want in a codebase is something rigid enough to satisfy today’s constraints (including optimizing them) and flexible enough to be modified for some likely future prospects.
So for any current features, cost of fixing bugs and do trivial adjustments should be very low. But working on new things should have a great ROI, especially because what’s existing can be reused as a foundation.
> Combinatorial complexity. It's the essential problem with software systems
After using OpenBSD for a while, I fully adopted the “write less code” approach. Create the simplest solution and leave “features” out until you need them. Nice to have should be practically banned.
But code is the mean to get an idea across to someone. It’s the difference between “I think this can work” and “I’ve worked on this and it does work”. I’m part of the OpenBSD mailing list and it quite nice someone sharing a diff for an idea or experiment. It may not get merged, but it’s better than realm of deliberations.
> as someone coming from software I find learning electronics pretty hard as it requires a completely different mental model and way to approach systems
I went from electronics to software and one thing that has puzzled me is how much people dislike reading docs as in reference manuals. People can get by with sloppy code full of hidden bugs and when those bugs arise they’re like deers frozen by headlights.
Imagine building a circuit without any ideas how it operates. I’ve encountered web devs that don’t understand how http works.
> Open source programs could be more like motivated explanations of computation.
It is already that. Every time a method/function is created, a structure is defined, a variable is added, a file is created or renamed,… It’s all for the purpose of human communication. The computer only need binary in a single file.
But people feels like they should be able to jumpninto curl code without any understanding of networking, or linux code with no knowlede of computer architecture. Few code are meant for total beginners.
Systems of humans have been shipping systems that no one persons can understand. Take the nuclear aircraft, there’s no part on it that you can’t find someone that is accountable for that part. That is why we can still build them and improve on the design.
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