I wish I had the time to respond more deeply to both this thread and birbs. But I almost completely agree with you all.
I'm now of the opinion that I'll be able to amass enough capital to retire before AI takes my job.
Legacy codebases simply require too big of a context window for an AI to appreciably absorb, and they never have high enough quality documentation available even if they did. They also often deal with systems that simply aren't connected unless you provide them agentic capabilities that don't exist yet. That's assuming you can get your security guy, whose entire job is to say "no" endlessly without ever providing solutions to problems, to let a robot crawl through your network and source code.
I'm literally proposing a 7-8 figure project around this tomorrow. There's a 30+ year-old AS/400 working alongside thousands of Access databases, hundreds of SQL Servers, and dozens of client applications. Each of these abstraction layers has hidden business logic, various interchange patterns, and bugs that have become features over 3 decades.
Even once we've disentangled a tiny part of the elephant to improve the state of play and build modern REST APIs to serve various client applications and partners, then there's a cadre of humans who have worked with these systems for so long that they need to gently be brought into the light, which takes far more money and time than anyone would care to admit.
This is one company of thousands. They're a little behind the baseline, but not by much. I've got another decade of dealing with the hardest problems in software and ahead of me if I can keep stomaching how endlessly frustrating it can be.
p
I wish I had the time to respond more deeply to both this thread and birbs. But I almost completely agree with you all.
I'm now of the opinion that I'll be able to amass enough capital to retire before AI takes my job.
Legacy codebases simply require too big of a context window for an AI to appreciably absorb, and they never have high enough quality documentation available even if they did. They also often deal with systems that simply aren't connected unless you provide them agentic capabilities that don't exist yet. That's assuming you can get your security guy, whose entire job is to say "no" endlessly without ever providing solutions to problems, to let a robot crawl through your network and source code.
I'm literally proposing a 7-8 figure project around this tomorrow. There's a 30+ year-old AS/400 working alongside thousands of Access databases, hundreds of SQL Servers, and dozens of client applications. Each of these abstraction layers has hidden business logic, various interchange patterns, and bugs that have become features over 3 decades.
Even once we've disentangled a tiny part of the elephant to improve the state of play and build modern REST APIs to serve various client applications and partners, then there's a cadre of humans who have worked with these systems for so long that they need to gently be brought into the light, which takes far more money and time than anyone would care to admit.
This is one company of thousands. They're a little behind the baseline, but not by much. I've got another decade of dealing with the hardest problems in software and ahead of me if I can keep stomaching how endlessly frustrating it can be.
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