Experienced distance runner here. This is not new or mysterious.
> Overtraining Syndrome is where a lack of recovery from training stress results in underperformance, often combined with Mood Disturbances such as reduced Motivation, depression and anxiety
I am also worried about "cognitive debt". I hardly remember what I had Claude do, even hours later. Back in May, I advised of a similar mitigation, citing the "generation effect" as the reason typing the code would make you remember it better:
> For your next ticket or feature, engage with your LLM as you normally would to produce a design and implementation plan, but with that plan in hand, make the mechanical edits yourself...You can expect this to improve your knowledge retention compared to merely reading a diff. You want to go slower now so that later you can go at all.
the punchline: "Refactoring reduces token consumption"
I appreciate the effort to quantify the benefit rather than pontificate. It's worth mentioning Martin Fowler wrote a whole book on refactoring [1], in which he states, "to refactor, the essential precondition is [...] solid tests", which I think is the real benefit here, AI or not. Good tests protect against regressions, whether human or robot. They also help encode the spec, which humans and robots can read.
I think the real punchline was that the value saved was on the order of cents!
> Every single change that touches the data access layer from this point forward now costs significantly less.
> How much of a saving? Assuming Sonnet 5 pricing at the time of writing of $3/MTok, 39.7 cents.
Now consider OpenAI's price drop, and open models, and consider that in the long run tokens will get cheaper. And think that the refactor needs to be human guided at a price of what for a senior developer - $100/hour?
Only person asking this, but it's possible they ran out a statute of limitations by going down the wrong path. (SoL normally begins when the prosecution becomes aware that the crime has happened. In the USA SoL for most felonies is often 3 years.)
Three days ago, Rob Walling (SaaS investor) refuted pretty convincingly the claim that genai kills SaaS. His life mission and wealth are bound up in SaaS. If he's not scared, nobody should be.
Fair that motivated reasoning could be at play. Rob's audience is SaaS founders, but whether his listeners remain engaged and his sales funnel full does not influence how genai affects their businesses, and being duplicitous doesn't fit with his character.
Since 2002 Richard Stallman has spoken again using term "content" this way.
> using the word as a noun to describe works and communications through which people have expressed themselves adopts an attitude you might rather avoid: it treats them as a commodity whose purpose is to fill a box and make money. In effect, it disparages all the works by subordinating them to the box that is full.
The entirety of that compilation of words is worth a read.
I recommend checking out "Artificial Intelligence", "Consume", "Consumer" and "Monetize", "Players" and "Product"
Reading that article I feel almost like he's trying to defend the honor of the MIT AI Lab more than anything else. Fitting given he already died on that hill last time with Marvin Minsky.
I was searching for this exact link to share here, and then DuckDuckGo surfaced your post.
Reading this article a few years ago was extremely influential for me, as I had been feeling awkward for a while about how we (authors and videomakers) have been going from "sharing actionable information and advice" to feeding the platforms so we can get crumbs from their monetization efforts.
This was the first thing I thought of. Came to comments to search for Stallman. I was going to say I remember him saying it at least 15 years ago, but it's actually 24!
I'm glad you mentioned downward market pressure on quality. I agree that is an issue. That's why I advocate for licensure of software engineering professionals, which exerts a counteracting force back up.
Software projects are too large to be left to licensed practitioners if you want to ensure quality. It would require the producing company to follow a formal quality management system. Discussing individual licensing is a distraction until that is in place.
That's an interesting argument. In construction, the larger a project, the more justifiable it is to invest in quality. Is it different than software? I think a better argument against licensure is that it makes small projects too expensive, but I disagree. It shifts not the overall cost, but when cost is paid: "The upfront cost will increase, but a long tail of costs stemming from quality issues will decrease."
I worked for 10 years in medical devices. QMS was business as usual. I think large software projects with millions budgeted should have them. But the difference between a QMS and licensure is a person's signature and their personal commitment to a statement of ethics as well as their accountability and ability to appeal to a professional organization.
> Overtraining Syndrome is where a lack of recovery from training stress results in underperformance, often combined with Mood Disturbances such as reduced Motivation, depression and anxiety
https://fellrnr.com/wiki/Overtraining_Syndrome