In the late 90s, I remember everyone freaking out about Y2K. I knew how to write software, and I thought I understood the problem (and from a purely technical standpoint, I did). I wrote the whole thing off as people making a mountain of a molehill because surely no competent modern programmer would make a mistake like that, right? This opinion seemed validated when the year 2000 came and went without any apparent major incident.

Thing is, I was young, inexperienced, and naïve. I didn't understand a few things:

1. How often hastily-written good-enough-for-now code finds its way into production systems in order to meet a deadline (also, how long legacy code tends to stick around (I'm looking at you, COBOL)).
2. How much work went on behind the scenes scrambling to fix the problem before it happened.

Now, with LLMs, we have a way to generate such code at scale, and I can't help but wonder about the price we're going to pay for it down the line, all in the name of shipping code on an arbitrary deadline.