my webserver never needed a million lines of code just to pass bytes to other people

Just consider how laughable some working conditions in software are and then come to realize how architecture is shaped by the organization communication patterns and not reality. You will see it in a different light then.

All those "paying down" technical debt with AI, I would advise reading the code _very_ carefully. Sometimes the "solution" which passes some test or adheres to some described functionality is incredibly narrow / brittle, and/or has failure cases that are non-obvious.

Yes I'm using $latest_model on high, its still not there. Unless your threshold for "fixed" is "the 1M line lean proof runs, we don't know how it works", it still requires a lot of attention, hand-holding, and scrutiny, especially when fixing issues / working around failures (where it tends to shortcut or invent workarounds).

So, the headline should read,

"AI is helping us eliminate 40 years of technical debt."

Since AI found the bug, and probably also generated the patch at this point.

An abundance of solutions is a problem for people who sell solutions.

Well now, Great Responsibles, it's clear you too were out of your collective depth and were all paying for your smug hubris. Perhaps take a bite out of that humble pie you've obviously never tasted?

I've been bullish on Rust for years because memory safety is simply too important and Rust can essentially prove an implementation correct and solve a certain class of very important bugs. It doesn't solve every problem and there is a complexity cost.

I've also said that writing multithreaded code is simply too complex. In an era of out-of-order execution, different levels of caching, asymmetric cores, hyperthreading (although this is largely dead now?), branch prediction and having to support multiple architectures it's simply too hard for most people to write correct multithreaded code. Period. If you find yourself as a non-library developer creating a mutex or spawning a thread, somebody has screwed up.

This is also why I think the single-threaded async/await model with post-request teardown of PHP is the correct choice for most people.

We're going to go through a dark period of a lot of 0days. As the article notes, this is paying 40 years of technical debt. It will result in a more secure ecosystem however. I believe this will ultimately also hamper black markets, governments and 3 letter agencies who trade in those 0days.

As painful as this all is, it will ultimately be a good thing, one of the few to come out of AI (IMHO).

I fear it's only going to get worse.