Code is a Liability
In a world where LLM generated code replaces SaaS, how many lines of code will we have and who will maintain them?
Any accountant or investor will tell you software is an asset. Any developer will tell you that code is a liability. Maintaining it is expensive. We try and write as little of it as possible. On purpose.
AI on the other hand does no such thing. Not only is it able to crank out lines of code faster even than the mythical 100x developer it is also very happy to do so with little thought given to code reuse, common libraries or frameworks. Especially if those libraries and frameworks happen to be private.
While there have been improvement in this area over the last year, the sheer concept of generating entire applications using LLMs or other generative AI tools flies in the face of code reuse. This is especially true of enterprise applications which will often be composed of numerous internal (private) libraries. Perhaps we will see advancements in identification of duplicated code by LLMs and extraction of that into shared libraries that then become part of its training set to be used in generating future code? We can only hope.
Certainly, if we end up in a world where SaaS applications are redundant as predicted by the CEO of Microsoft Satya Nadella, we had better hope their replacements generated by LLMs can also the modified, maintained and updated by LLMs. I don’t envy the team that has to maintain a suite of LLM written applications replete duplicate code.
The above is an extract taken from
