An excellent talk from Doctrow as always. A lot of it I’ve hard before, but this part was new to me.
The thing is, software is not an asset, it’s a liability. The capabilities that running software delivers – automation, production, analysis and administration – those are assets. But the software itself? That’s a liability. Brittle, fragile, forever breaking down.
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Now, obviously, tech bosses are totally clueless when it comes to this. They really do think that software is an asset. That’s why they’re so fucking horny to have chatbots shit out software at superhuman speeds. That’s why they think it’s good that they’ve got a chatbot that “produces a thousand times more code than a human programmer.”
Producing code that isn’t designed for legibility and maintainability, that is optimized, rather, for speed of production, is a way to incur tech debt at scale.
An excellent talk from Doctrow as always. A lot of it I’ve hard before, but this part was new to me.