Yours is a good point. I know that the guy who solo-created Redis uses AI effectively to write tests - he gives it a lot of handwritten tests and a lot of context, and then asks it to match the style and pattern, which it does well.

I’ve got something like half a million to a million lines, a crazy level of cyclomatic complexity, and a team that doesn’t see a problem with it. That’s the tough part - socialising the changes. We tend to arbitrarily rename vars/methods and not keep things in the same place, so there is a lot of drift.

I think AI might be able to unpack some of that, but there is a sort of irreducible accidental complexity that would require a human to make decisions about what some things mean. In some cases, you could get a gaggle of devs in the same room and they would not be able to arrive at a decision about what the code is doing or even what it should be doing.