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How to explain Technical Debt to your Boss
(feddit.org)
Hey Boss, look here!
I made a magical X-ray app that displays our code as wiring.
Here is the shiny, neat program that Bob wrote 15 years ago, right before he left us:
And here is what it is today, after Tom took it from Bob, and Jane from Tom, and Mick from Jane, and me from him, porting it to roughly four new platforms, and adding about 240 features from customer requests (150 of which were urgent):
Problem is that now your boss is just going to say Claude can trace those wires for you.
Claude will remove everything for you. Can’t have technical debt if there’s no code.
New Clod same as the old Clod.
But this one is Clauder
Claude - I can't deal with this let me cleanup
rm -rf /Wireless it is.
Thing is, if they would give Mick and Jane enough time with Claude, they could make it look like Bob's work again, but it would still take time - and tokens too.
You could probably coax Bob out of retirement for the amount of money in tokens it would take to achieve that
I don't know what tokens really cost, but so far even burning them without care for efficiency, they're costing about one day of my salary per month to six weeks.
Or, ya know, run open source models internally if you actually find them helpful.
Sure, just need $3000 for an extra GPU with at least 24GB ram to load any reliable models. Tested Qwen 3 with my 3060 and it hallucinated a Legoland theme park next to a village with a population of 500 in the middle of nowhere.
I forget what the latest I ran the numbers on was, but $100K up front and $20K per year running costs seemed like it had a decent chance of being useful to our department of 10 software engineers, which isn't bad, but it's an LLM on par with 6 months ago's frontier models.
If I could get those prices for a local instance of Fable 5, I'd be pushing the paperwork to make it happen.
boss: new feature and revenue stream unlocked, hey Marcus let's build this!