Quoting Florian Herrengt

Simon Willison's Blog News
ai software-engineering debugging code-complexity opinion

Summary

A quoted excerpt from Florian Herrengt's blog post discusses how AI-assisted development can lead to undebuggable, convoluted codebases where even AI tools like Claude can't fix issues, highlighting a growing problem in software engineering.

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# A quote from Florian Herrengt Source: [https://simonwillison.net/2026/Aug/12/florian-herrengt/](https://simonwillison.net/2026/Aug/12/florian-herrengt/) 12th August 2026 > But then users start to report a weird bug\. It's the 4th time your team has been trying to fix it\. I mean\.\.\. asking AI to fix it\. Unfortunately, it seems like not even Fable can figure it out\. You go talk to the person who worked on this feature\. "So where does the data come from?" "Hmm\.\.\. actually I don't know\. Let me ask Claude\." You sit next to each other watching an endless wall of text appear on the screen\. Neither of you has any idea whether any of it is true but Claude seems very confident\. \[\.\.\.\] This project has become so convoluted, with so many layers and services, that no one on your team could possibly start to understand what's going on\. —[Florian Herrengt](https://blog.florianherrengt.com/ai-removing-middle-class-software-engineering.html),AI is removing the middle class of software engineering

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