Is AI making our code fragile, and stuck in 2019?
Follow-up to Thursday Nov 5: AI finds 948 Linux bugs, and 40 years of old code comes dueLast Thursday, IEEE Spectrum said AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt, the old messy code we never fixed. Now the top AI story on Hacker News asks if AI is creating new debt. A post by Evan X. Merz, titled 'AI usage generates a fragile codebase', got 605 points and 574 comments. That many comments shows developers have strong feelings.
A second story points to one possible cause. Google Chrome's team shared a free guide on GitHub to get coding agents 'off ~2019 JavaScript, onto modern web primitives'. In simple words: agents often write web code the old way, because that is what they learned from. It got 401 points.
So the debate is no longer only 'can AI write code?'. It is 'can we live with the code it writes, five years from now?'
Code runs your bank, your car and your hospital. If agents write more of it, faster, and fewer people really understand it, the bill comes later, often as security holes. To be fair, I wrote fragile code long before AI, so humans are not off the hook.
