Voices
Zach Kehs on why bad code has no floor, and what that means for LLM-accelerated teams
Kehs's September 4 essay, quoted by Simon Willison on September 6, rejects the sinking-ship metaphor for decaying codebases: unlike a building, software has no structural point at which it collapses, so "technical debt has no bankruptcy." He draws on Amazon order-processing systems that stayed in production at 1-2 orders per second while repeated redesigns accumulated layers instead of replacing them. On AI he is blunt: if company incentives are what degrade your software, "LLMs are not going to change that. They will accelerate you along the trajectory you are already on."
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