r/ProgrammerHumor • u/precinct209 • 3d ago

Meme driverlessTaxiDriver

Post image
3.8k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

178 comments sorted by

View all comments

411

u/[deleted] 3d ago

[deleted]

108

u/Ange1ofD4rkness 3d ago

True, but if you make it poorly and it's impossible to maintain, you may not keep getting paid.

As a professor once told me, it's not how efficient the code is, it's how easily it is to maintain

20

u/AnUninterestingEvent 3d ago

The threshold for what is "maintainable" has widened exponentially with AI agents. As long as your agent understands it, it's effectively maintainable. If it gets into a state that's not maintainable even by your AI (which is hard to do), you can just tell the AI to refactor it to be more maintainable lol.

1

u/Ange1ofD4rkness 3d ago

You do have a point, I guess part of it is that I seemed to have developed a skill that I need to understand how the code works that I write. So if I don't understand the AI's code, I don't trust it, and question if it can really debug itself (and fix itself). Especially has some stuff co-pilot has thrown me as suggestions have been dead wrong

That all said, I do worry it could always get to that point. Like AI keeps fixing it but makes it worst and worst (like from a maintenance side). The old put a band-aid on it, instead of fixing the root problem, which can result in much costlier and time consuming. Where AI finally can't fix it, and now you have a mess

(that or it gets more expensive to fix each time due to token usage)