AI Makes Software Engineering Harder

Before the dawn of LLMs, software projects always had a large absorption factor. Despite surprises blowing up in your face, a project would absorb the damage and continue on as normal. At the beginning of each project, an engineer would scope the problem based on their understanding of the code and their familiarity with a domain. Inherent in this project lifecycle was complexity hidden just out of sight by surreptitious bugs, dependencies or legacy code.