One side of the equation is definitely that we'll get more 'bad' code.
But nearly every engineer I've ever spoken to has over-indexed on 'tech debt bad'. Tech debt is a lot like normal debt - you can have a lot of it and still be a healthy business.
The other side of the equation is that it's easier to understand and make changes to code with LLMs. I've been able to create "Business Value" (tm) in other people's legacy code bases in languages I don't know by making CRUD apps do things differently from how they currently do things.
Before, I'd needed to have hired a developer who specialises in that language and paid them to get up to speed on the code base.
So I agree with the article that the concerns are valid, but overall I'm optimistic that it's going to balance out in the long run - we'll have more code, throw away more code, and edit code faster, and a lot of that will cancel.
But nearly every engineer I've ever spoken to has over-indexed on 'tech debt bad'. Tech debt is a lot like normal debt - you can have a lot of it and still be a healthy business.
The other side of the equation is that it's easier to understand and make changes to code with LLMs. I've been able to create "Business Value" (tm) in other people's legacy code bases in languages I don't know by making CRUD apps do things differently from how they currently do things.
Before, I'd needed to have hired a developer who specialises in that language and paid them to get up to speed on the code base.
So I agree with the article that the concerns are valid, but overall I'm optimistic that it's going to balance out in the long run - we'll have more code, throw away more code, and edit code faster, and a lot of that will cancel.