Ex-Apple engineer misses the permanence of 15-year-old code
When I worked at Apple, I remember seeing code that was 15 years old
Sean Geiger, a former Apple engineer, reflects on the era when code files were annotated with dates and authors, comparing them to bricks in a house. He contrasts this with today's AI-assisted development, where code appears 'like magic' but lacks the tactile connection. The post sparked a discussion, with Mitchell Hashimoto sharing an AI mishap and others debating whether software quality is declining.
Now you can will whole houses and neighborhoods into existence. You don’t even see the bricks go in. They just tumble in from the sky.
- dig1
> The houses are better, and they go up faster...
This is highly debatable. They look better, but whenever I inspect the walls and see what is holding the house together, I just shrug and leave my contact info, because I know I’ll be called to fix the mess.
> ...and building them increasingly feels like magic.
Engineering should not feel like magic to those with a proper education. Otherwise, we are merely practicing alchemy.
- amanzi
I agree with Mitchell's original post: "stay frosty with AI", and I disagree with response that says "the houses are better". I'm assuming that Mitchell was saying you should treat all AI code with caution, and the more I work with AI-generated code, the more I agree with this sentiment. Even the frontier models (Fable, Opus, Sol, etc) all make fundamental errors from time to time, and if you're not keeping your eyes open these are easy to miss.
Just the other day, I got Fable to help generate a sign-up flow for a Django app. It looked perfect to me, and like the Twitter post linked to, I looked at it with marvel and delight. But I got Sol to review the code and it spotted some fundamental issues with the flow that would have let bad actors enumerate accounts and log in before their account was verified - both of which were supposed to be checked.
To continue with the analogy, yes we can "will houses into existence", but unless we've checked the bricks and the foundations, these houses can easily crumble into rubble.
- yaris
As part of my current assignment I see code and tests that are 15 years old (or more), and I only hope that people who wrote this code have become better as software engineers since then. Otherwise there is no hope for humanity.