Maintenance is already perceived as one hell of a cost center.
I'd have enough money if to train my own foundation model if somebody gave me a nickel for every time somebody underestimated the time to rebuild an existing e-business system by orders of magnitude because they were ignorant of all the "requirements" that were satisfied by the existing system that were undocumented.
The most expensive maintenance problem comes when you've accumulated a lot of data that is incorrectly structured and may or may not be possible to migrate to a new, correct, structure.
Fred Brooks in No Silver Bullet pointed out that software development involves multiple phases, say 5 of them (requirements gathering, design, coding, testing, deployment) and that even if you could reduce the time involved in one of those to zero there is no "revolution".
The corollary to that is that the opportunities from ChatGPT come out of identifying the things that ChatGPT does poorly. For instance it might be just as important to turn code back into requirements as to turn requirements int code. There was a post the other day about a "simple" problem in CSS that turned out to be hard because of the deep understanding required
the ratio is much worse between spending 3 minutes to make a partial solution with ChatGPT and 3 hours to really solve the problem as opposed to 30 minutes to make a partial solution manually and 3 hours to really solve it. That is all the more reason to clean house at the lower levels, either make a style sheet language that is not so fraught or maybe make one that's designed so that chatbots can write good code for it.
There has been hype over "no code" and "low code" tools for the longest time and people have been chasing that revolution for a long time and it's astonishing how many innovations have been forgotten (like the 1990s CASE tools that could turn code into diagrams and back again and leave formatting intact.) Real progress involves solving all the problem that is ahead of us instead of cherry picking the parts of the problem we want to solve and thinking wishfully that will be sufficient.
