Post #1033589

Another thought about "AI" coding agents: lines of code produced has always been a terrible metric, but at least until now lines of code produced and lines of code understood have been roughly* at parity. Agents have now made it possible for the number of lines of code produced to grow exponentially without growing the number of lines of code understood at the same rate. In fact, the number of lines of code understood may be static or even shrinking as people rely on agents to do their "understanding" for them. I realize that nobody likes paying programmer salaries while also having to put up with programmers for the privilege, but I fear this brain drain can only result in unmanageable technical debt when there's nobody left who knows how stuff works in order to fix it when it breaks. * Roughly. Don't @ me.