Nobody Reads Anyone Else's Code — And Now Nobody Reads AI's Either
In a world of AI, having a unique voice and clear, personal vision will be the differentiator.
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I enjoyed reading the post by Andreas Horn yesterday, and I just want to point out how many of the comments were developers stating that they aren't even reading the code before shipping it lol.
That dovetails with another comment I made about how developers and project teams are reluctant to re-leverage what has been built, and to refactor or extend existing codebases. In practical terms, I've almost never witnessed a developer reuse another developer's or team's code.
The argument is always about risk (risk of dependencies intra-project) and cost (it takes time to read another's code). They'd always rather write it from scratch, even if it is largely replicating existing functionality in another set of code.
This introduces the same problem that duplicated data produces: different and contradictory logic in different places and the overhead of resolving discrepancies between the codebases or data stores.
And the cost of pulling the casino lever to regenerate something new seems cheap, at the beginning.
I don't think these two problems get any better when AI is writing the code, and am reminded of it after reading the comments.
Do you?
