"Im not even sure we will need maintain software" (sic) - I'm not sure what your specific background is, but with a statement like that you lose all legitimacy to me.
Yes, I'd like to hear more of their background, because they seem very naive about writing software, adding to it, testing it, etc.
You can't just whip up a replacement for salesforce using claude code. Who's going to fix the bugs, who is going to have tests, manage performance testing? People will still pay for software that is tested and performant. I could get a replacement for an online spreadsheet, google docs like thing. Suppose you tell it to copy the google docs or whatever programming language. You won't know if it's buggy because you won't haev the same test coverage. You'll never know about bugs that took a long time to reveal in some combination of features.
You can create a new system with a few features together to do something. Again, not tested, not perf tested, isn't away of a compiler bug you had to work around.
But lots of simple things can be claude coded and replaced. Say something that took a photo of a person, centered it, then say put some kind of log on the pic. Something you paid $5 a month to do.
Writings on the wall, it is true, tech debt will no longer be a thing to care about.
"but who will maintain it?" massive massive question, rapidly becoming completely irrelevant
"but who will review it?" humans sure, with the assistance of ai, writing is also on the wall: AI will soon become more adept at code review than any human
I can understand "losing all legitimacy" being a thing, but to me that is an obvious knee jerk reaction to someone who is not quite understanding how this trend curve is going.
Trust me, I’m a well seasoned leathery developer and I’m no newbie when it comes to using AI. But this level of irrational exuberance is so over the top I just can’t take it seriously.
Yes, in the very long term I expect this to be able to replace large swaths of the sw dev lifecycle, product, ideation, the whole kaboodle. That’s a long way off, whatever “a long way off” means in this accelerated timeline.
For the next bunch of years, yes you’ll have to worry about architecture, coupling, testing, etc. I’m happy to have my competitors share your attitude, cause we’ll smoke them in the market.
And the human downstream of this random reorganization of things at will, how do they manage it?
If its AI agents all the way down its commoditization all the way down, if humans have to deal with it there's some sort of cost for change even if its 0 for code.
