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0 pointsSeanAppleby2mo ago0 comments

One thing I've been tossing around in my head is:

- How quickly is cost of refactor to a new pattern with functional parity going down?

- How does that change the calculus around tech debt?

If engineering uses 3 different abstractions in inconsistent ways that leak implementation details across components and duplicate functionality in ways that are very hard to reason about, that is, in conventional terms, an existential problem that might kill the entire business, as all dev time will end up consumed by bug fixes and dealing with pointless complexity, velocity will fall to nothing, and the company will stop being able to iterate.

But if claude can reliably reorganize code, fix patterns, and write working migrations for state when prompted to do so, it seems like the entire way to reason about tech debt has changed. And it has changed more if you are willing to bet that models within a year will be much better at such tasks.

And in my experience, claude is imperfect at refactors and still requires review and a lot of steering, but it's one of the things it's better at, because it has clear requirements and testing workflows already built to work with around the existing behavior. Refactoring is definitely a hell of a lot faster than it used to be, at least on the few I've dealt with recently.

In my mind it might be kind of like thinking about financial debt in a world with high inflation, in that the debt seems like it might get cheaper over time rather than more expensive.

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ekidd2mo ago

> But if claude can reliably reorganize code, fix patterns, and write working migrations for state when prompted to do so, it seems like the entire way to reason about tech debt has changed.

Yup, I recently spent 4 days using Claude to clean up a tool that's been in production for over 7 years. (There's only about 3 months of engineering time spent on it in those years.)

We've known what the tool needed for many years, but ugh, the actual work was fairly messy and it was never a priority. I reviewed all of Opus's cleanup work carefully and I'm quite content with the result. Maybe even "enthusiastic" would be accurate.

So even if Claude can't clean up all the tech debt in a totally unsupervised fashion, it can still help address some kinds of tech debt extremely rapidly.

edg50002mo ago

Good point. Most of the cost in dealing with tech debt is reading the code and noting the issues. I found that Claude can produce much better code when it has a functionally correct reference implementation. Also it's not needed to very specifically point out issues. I once mentioned "I see duplicate keys in X and Y, rework it to reduce repetition and verbosity". It came up with a much more elegant way to implement it.

So maybe doing 2-3 stages makes sense. First stage needs to be functionallty correct, but you accept code smells such as leaky abstractions, verbosity and repetition. In stage 2 and 3 you eliminate all this. You could integrate this all into the initial specification; you won't even see the smelly intermediate code; it only exists as a stepping stone for the model to iteratively refine the code!

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