[…] Coding agents are now also introduced to production codebases. After 12 months, we are now beginning to see the effects of all that “progress”. Here’s my current view.
[…]
All of this compounds into an unrecoverable mess of complexity. The exact same mess you find in human-made enterprise codebases. Those arrive at that state because the pain is distributed over a massive amount of people. The individual suffering doesn’t pass the threshold of “I need to fix this”. The individual might not even have the means to fix things. And organizations have super high pain tolerance. But human-made enterprise codebases take years to get there. The organization slowly evolves along with the complexity in a demented kind of synergy and learns how to deal with it.
With agents and a team of 2 humans, you can get to that complexity within weeks.
This whole ordeal is going to be quite a wake-up call for some orgs. They spent this whole time thinking they only paid devs to produce code, not to understand it, because the understanding part was invisible to them.
Now they’re like astronauts blasting off to space and not knowing they need to bring oxygen with them, because they’re never seen any.