You pay tech debt with compounding interest at exorbitant rates.
Another way to look at it is to say that like any analogy applied to software development it is weak. It is not like normal debt at all because you must start paying back immediately one way or another. So you can't just pile hack on hack and wait for a year to pay back. You will start having to pay back for the hacks within a couple of months because of the bugs you have to fix and how hard it is to work with the messy codebase. In some cases you may even grind to a halt before you get anything substantial out to the customer. This doesn't mean that you should never hack stuff in. But in general it's cheaper to pay off the debt quickly instead of paying for the debt.
Mm... yeah I guess except the weird front grill it's doesn't look exactly bad... but then you scroll down to the other Ferrari at the bottom of the page... "oh".
> Some devs in my org have fully embraced AI; some would not even use AI
So if the people who embrace AI areore successful then the others will follow. Just like every other new tech. Why does AI have to be forced? What's the hurry? Especially when there's no clear example of a company jumping ahead because of their use of it.
It's idiots being driven by FUD. That's the reason.
There are definitely key windows here for innovation driven by competition.
There's also a need to quickly adopt and understand the technology; take the Internet for example. If we were talking about the Internet, forcing teams to build and publish web pages would be one valid way to get teams comfortable with the tech, the workflow, the shift in how to propagate and convey information to an audience.
Without a mandate, many teams won't adopt the Internet as a medium of information exchange because their processes work just fine and have worked for the last 20 years.
I think it's fair to put AI in a similar light. Unless teams adopt it and use it, it's hard for an org to understand how to get value out of this technology and how it affects existing processes and assumptions.
> There are definitely key windows here for innovation driven by competition.
Those were always there, and will always be there. The type of time frames people are getting anxious about now rarely work in the real world, though, where potential customers don’t just switch products/service provides unless they’re facing catastrophic outcomes if they don’t.
And AI is not making the difference there that people think. I worked on a product that entered the market as a newcomer, wooed plenty of customers, and even though everyone _wanted_ it, only customers _urgently_ looking for a solution got on board quick (within <6 months).
Ironically enough, the product pivoting to Agentic AI hard killed a ton of momentum and interest from customers, despite exciting investors.
I genuinely think you don't actually know the history and timeline of companies you talk about. Mostly because it did not happened how you imagine, in the quick timeline you imagine nor even for reasons you imagine.
And even more importantly, the companies who went all in early and spent too much money on it too early without good reason went boom. You had to have actual business reason for it to be success.
And you think forcing blockbuster's software teams to use the Web would have changed that? You don't think they were using the web for all their corporate communications systems? I very much think they were, and getting blindsided by streaming had probably nothing to do with blockbuster's existing engineering teams not understanding the Internet. Their product teams didn't understand it, but they wouldn't be the ones being "forced to write webpages" either
Seriously. No mandates at my company. In 2023 and 2024 i had access to Claude, but frankly it wasn't until 2025 that i found the models useful enough, now i use them every day. Nobody forced me. Had they forced me, I'd probably have quit. Once the tools were sufficiently mature and verifiably helpful, people like me all over the company naturally picked up the tools too.
I think your comment is the disingenuous one. We have no time left and "Fix the power source" is happening way too slowly in the real non-theoretical world. But what can happen in zero time is to not build another data center for something that nobody really needs.
There was an article in the FT a while ago about how confused and frustrated Trump was about the strait of Hormuz. The conclusion was that not everyone has a price but that concept was outside of the scope of his narrow mind.
"Refuse to use them" is a strawman. Of course the graduates will use them. They will do whatever it takes to make a living. What they hate is that either they won't make a living or they will make a worse living because of AI.
I've been here since 2008 and I'll say it. Vividfrier is a bot. The people behind the likes of vividfrier are vandals, shitting all over the commons just to get even more than the massive amount they have already been given.
HN was a tremendous resource built by its members and the moderators. In the last year or so a lot of that has been destroyed by people who have no sense of decency. They see deception as a virtue. They call it hustle or whatever. WTF?
This argument comes up a lot. The point is that with unreviewed AI nobody understood the code at any time (including the AI). This is completely different to a C compiler wherein the writers and maintainers deeply understand the code. This means that even though I don't understand it, I can use it with some confidence.
Your point about AI being another abstraction similar to the "mostly deterministic" C compiler also comes up often but there are many arguments against it. If you think the determinism of a compiler and an AI are similar then I'm not sure whether you know anything about how either of them work or have even compared examples of what they produce.
Another way to look at it is to say that like any analogy applied to software development it is weak. It is not like normal debt at all because you must start paying back immediately one way or another. So you can't just pile hack on hack and wait for a year to pay back. You will start having to pay back for the hacks within a couple of months because of the bugs you have to fix and how hard it is to work with the messy codebase. In some cases you may even grind to a halt before you get anything substantial out to the customer. This doesn't mean that you should never hack stuff in. But in general it's cheaper to pay off the debt quickly instead of paying for the debt.
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