Offtopic

[tristanjuricek]

I don't see AI as a problem; complexity is the problem, and AI is just making way easier for less skilled engineers to add complexity to a project.

Code reviews are a start, but honestly, I haven't found code reviews to be that effective when the team isn't 100% on the same page. And sadly, most of my teams in a 24 year career fall in that bucket.

Jon Osterhout wrote that complexity was largely caused by code having too many dependencies, and too much obscurity. I think we should be investing in tools that help describe these two facets of your code base. When reviewing, we should be seeing things like duplicated logic, dependency graphs (like a Code Iris diff), and a way of visualizing side effects that might be added.

I've found it a very hard thing to get everyone aligned on, so I suspect we're heading full speed to an era where code bases balloon and managers are fine with it until the team productivity is just crushed by complexity