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Comment by rstuart4133

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Comment by rstuart4133

The conclusion I came to is we are going to move from a hard science where everything is known, to being more like social science where everything is a guess based on confidence intervals. It's what happens when no one human mind knows the system well enough to predict what any small change will have on the rest of it. We call such computer systems "balls of mud". [0] says most deployed computer systems are balls of mud, so it's not the end of the world.

All vibe coded systems are balls of mud by definition if you use the conventional definition. If you allow "understandable by an AI" then right now not much changes because AI aren't so hot at designing systems and even if they could, they make poor use of their limited context. Whether that changes in future is the big unknown.

We already know how balls of mud evolve. New features are "bolted on the side", making the system more inscrutable. These bolted on systems often grow interdependencies on each other, creating a spaghetti of relationships no one is aware of. This means every change could introduce a bug whose blast radius is the entire system. Changes get harder and harder. A death of sorts, or at least a growth limit is reached when on average every bug fixes introduces more bugs than it fixed.

Google Chrome is a fine example of this happening right now. It used to be a highly modular combination of mostly independent systems that had their own champion who understood them intimately. They left, Google management insisted the client platform that supports most of eco-system continued to evolve and grow. The ball of mud was formed. It's been evident for years chrome has a higher bug injection rate than Firefox. As complexity grew it became too hard to move to new tool versions, so compilers and libraries got pinned to known working version. That made it too hard to use as a component, so projects like ChromeOS are being replaced with Aluminium OS. Now the that Matt Jolly has thrown in the towel [1] it's hard to see how distributions like Gentoo and Debian that used his work can continue to ship chromium. Debian can use ungoogled chromium, but vendored libraries, obsolete tool chains, inability to do forky mandated reproducible builds make it look like it's a foreign object bolted into a true open source project. This is what software death looks like. It's not a bang, projects cease to evolve, then can't meet new requirements, and then are replaced.

It doesn't have to be that way. Projects like the open source kernels are decades old, but their strong stewardship has ensured they remained decomposable, so people can work independently on different sections without too much fear of stomping on each other's toes. Open source stewardship seems particularly good at this, possibly because open source projects can take a very long term view. A manager in a large organisation on the other hand is usually around for only a few years. They take the short term wins that come from features bolted on the side safe in the knowledge the long term death of the software will be somebody else's problem.

[0] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Brian-Foote-2/publicati...

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/1097760/

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