> These apps will win awards at the next all-hands. In two years they’ll be unmaintainable tech debt some poor soul inherits and rewrites from scratch.
Huge assumption/prediction that I think is actually just wrong. There's this weird assumption from a certain crowd, never justified or explained, that tech debt accrued by AI is now, and will forever be, impossible for AI to address, and will for some reason require humans to fix. Working at pace with agents I accrue tech debt every day, then go through the code nightly, again with agents, to clean and tidy everything up.
The more I see this view espoused the more bizzare it seems. People's assumptions seem to be "if AI couldn't one shot this perfectly the first time, then it's useless to try to have it go back over the codebase and identify and address issues". This doesn't match my personal experience at all, second or third passes over code with CC or Codex are almost always helpful and weed out critical issues, but I'm open to hearing from the rest of the HN crowd on their experiences on this.
I think human understanding of the surface area of a company is already very unwieldy. AI balloons the surface area. at some point using more AI to solve AI is reasonable! But to whatever extent a human needs to interface and manage this world, that's the accrued debt.
Then we went through ~10 complete rewrites based on the learnings from previous attempts. As we went through these iterations, I became much more knowledgeable of the domain - because I saw failure points, I read the resulting code and because I asked the right questions.
Without AI, I would likely have given up after iteration 2, and certainly would not do 10 iterations.
So the nuance here is that iterating and throwing away the entire thing is going to become much cheaper, but not without an engineer being in the loop, asking the right questions.
Note: each iteration went through dual reviews of codex and opus at each phase with every finding fixed and review saying everything is perfect, the best thing on earth.
The problem is that vanishingly few people actually understand the code and are asking the agents to do all of the interpretation and reasoning for them.
This code that you've built is only maintainable for as long as you are still around at the company to work on it -- it's essentially a codebase that you're the only domain expert in. That's not a good outcome for companies either.
My prediction is that the companies that learn this lesson are the ones that are going to stick around. LLMs won't be in wide use for features but for throwaway busy-work type problems that eat lots of human resources and can't be ignored.
I'm positive that the last company's CEO probably mandates by now that nobody must write a single line of code by hand and there's likely some rigid process everyone has to follow.
Fun times ahead.
But if there aren't enough returns soon the money will eventually dry up for OAI and Anthropic and Google will not be trusted with their cash balance.
Its amazing how people here think that money is a play-thing and this dance can go on forever. It cant and wont and the fear-induced marketing doesnt work forever either.
Getting real tired of people new to AI thinking only recent LLMs are AI somehow. BoW was a pretty solid technique and that only requires you to learn how to count to one.
So which companies are betting so big that it might actually threaten them? Oracle maybe?
Only with the blessing of shareholders. Frankly Google's search box and ad-tech has been carrying all of its failed bets but at some point people will start questioning if Google is returning enough cash given the results of new investments. Google's management does not own the cash - it holds the cash on behalf of the owners.
https://www.axios.com/2026/03/18/ai-enterprise-revenue-anthr...
Not pulling any punches over there. It does feel like 95% of the "AI industry" consists of wrappers and associated tools.
If the chairman dictates DEI, DEI it is. Most software developers put up the proper flags in their Twitter "bios" and purged opponents. The same developers now queue to work for Zuckerberg's "male energy" company.
If the chairman and the industry dictate AI, AI it is. The same people who said girls and coal miners have to code now talk about efficiency, products and rationalize layoffs.
This is the product of an industry that has been dominated by bullshitters for at least two decades.
The corporate world has always been 80% lies, fake KPIs and theatre. "Synergies", "disruptive innovation" "digital transformation", same shit since the 90s. Managers don't give a flying fuck about your clever moat. They wake up one day, get a spreadsheet from McKinsey saying "cut 15%" and boom - your undocumented wizardry gets deleted along with your badge. Nothing personal, just Excel doing what Excel does.
Yes, the corporate bullshitry has been turbocharged with AI now. But it's nothing new and nothing that much tragic. At the very least the same AI can help me finally release personal projects that have been collecting dust for years. Who knows what the future will bring. I'd be much more worried of oil supply chokehold than of AI turbo circus in the corporate world. No oil means not having enough food tomorrow; or medical supplies. My child might die because of this. But AI temporarily causing perturbations at work is just another round of corporate theatre. Been there many times.
Employment danger is real, but not apocalyptic. Some jobs will evaporate, sure. But even as the same articles states, now once thing ("AI know-how") replaced another thing ("domain knowledge siloing"). The corporate machine still needs warm bodies for the messy human parts: sales, talking to customers (customers hate talking to a robot, what a fucking surprise), covering ass. I would say, covering ass is the most important one, along with delegating the project management to someone else below on the corporate hierarchy, so upper management wouldn't have to work and would only keep asking for status updates. They would always need someone to type the actual AI requests. It's not like top management or VP would ever do that, neither they would ever run it automatically, since AI can delete production (happened many times), and they don't want to be the scapegoats.
So yeah, the article is overdramatic trash for clicks. AI is just another round of that circus. The "famine" won't be real, it'll be a bunch of overpromises, just as usual. Same as it ever has been.
The buzzwords you cite are the vulnerabilities of the corporations which predator consultancies rely on to make sales. I don't know that the corporate world is 'about' those things so much as it suffers from them.
Not sure why I was downvoted. I read the post and the linked articles.