In March, I was at a ConfigManagementCamp in Ghent, speaking about themes from Human Software.
Some entrepreneurs earlier in the programme had been boasting that GenAI-enabled engineers were delivering 50,000 lines of code a day. My response was immediate distaste. But why?
There’s an old saying in software engineering: YAGNI — You Ain’t Going To Need It. The corollary is that most of the time, we don’t need more code. We need less.
Don’t show me how many lines of code you added. Show me how many you removed to make your design more elegant.
The Spinning Jenny industrialised spinning. AgenticAI is Blake’s dark satanic mills. An entire factory of models running simultaneously, burning tokens and destroying communities to build data centres, divert water and power, all to produce software faster than anyone asked for.
I became an engineer to solve problems for humanity, not create them. I use grep, sed and awk and UNIX tools that do exactly one thing well. AI is the opposite – it’s a planet-guzzling Swiss Army Knife of destruction, and it’s a seeming inevitability.
Engineers like me are afraid to say no to AI, and it’s easy to see why. It’s because the narrative is overwhelming, and the job threat is real, as is the threat to our towns and villages from data centres and the power plants that feed them. But if we outsource our thinking and actions to proprietary machines owned by private individuals, we lose leverage over our own destinies.
It’s not a golden age of software development. It’s a wasteful one. Do one thing well. Think about the cost of your actions.
Human Software — get it here