All code is a liability

A close friend was really worried about the future of job security in engineering roles, probably after some conversations about AI with colleagues. Luckily, this one was easy. Here's what I shared with them, in case it helps more people.

There are things you learn in any trade with time and experience. In software, the key lesson is this:

All software code is a liability. The bigger the code base, the bigger the cost of maintaining and changing it.

AI tools need context. A small part of it may be in the code, but a bigger part lives in tickets, documents, one-off conversations and team meetings, and some of it left with people who don't work there anymore. If anything, all the code written with AI tools will need to be maintained once it starts generating revenue.

It's a great tool for assisted development, for sure, similar to how the jump from Notepad to code editors made certain things faster and easier.

An opportunity in security

On a different note, this might be a good time to get into security for bug bounties. AI-assisted code bases are going to reveal and duplicate security vulnerabilities from existing code bases that were private before and became part of the training data.