“If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it,” is one of the key advices my coding mentors taught me when I started my career when it comes to legacy code. I got reminded of this when I came to know about the talk about cisco AI code rewrite project.
That too, when a vendor’s equipment runs most of the Internet’s traffic, if I were the one who gives that go-ahead to change, I would rather not!
GenAI’s fallacies are well known. Forget about AI agents, just the ability of any LLM to generate clean code is under scrutiny. Irrespective of how many tokens you give them.
In this context, this following purportedly stated by Jeetu Patel alarms me:
“I’ve given him unlimited tokens because he’s going to refactor code,” Patel told Fortune at a small roundtable dinner. “So I’m like, you can go, you can go nuts.”
To be clear, it’s not about any 27-year old or Gen-Z doing that work. It’s about the technology that’s being relied on, which (presumably) is the next word generator, which uses the already messed-up code in the Internet. There are loads and loads of complaints from frustrated coders from all over the world when they rely on LLMs to generate their code.
Having worked in some modules of a C-compiler earlier in my career, and also having done extensive testing in multiple cisco router models, I understand the complexity.
Imagine the testing that would be involved with the refactored code! Where and how are you going to test it?
I feel it’s not at all worth to put the world at risk with this effort. Billions of lives depend on the Internet for their services.
We live in interesting times. These times are also risky and potentially very dangerous. Let better sense prevail.