alt Hacker News> LLM-assisted coding is most successful in codebases with attributes strongly associated with high code quality: predictable patterns, well-named variables, use of a type system, no global mutable state, very low mutability in general, etc.
That's all very true, but what you're missing is that the proportion of codebases that need this is shrinking relative to the total number of codebases. There's an incredible proliferation of very small, bespoke, simple, AI-coded apps, that are nonetheless quite useful. Most are being created by people who have never written a line of code in their life, who will do no maintenance, and who will not give two craps how the code looks, any more than the average YouTuber cares about the aperture of their lens or the average forum commenter care about the style of their prose.
We don't see these apps because we're professional software engineers working on the other stuff. But we're rapidly approaching a world where more and more software is created by non-professionals.
> That's all very true, but what you're missing is that the proportion of codebases that need this is shrinking relative to the total number of codebases. There's an incredible proliferation of very small, bespoke, simple, AI-coded apps, that are nonetheless quite useful. Most are being created by people who have never written a line of code in their life, who will do no maintenance, and who will not give two craps how the code looks, any more than the average YouTuber cares about the aperture of their lens or the average forum commenter care about the style of their prose.
I agree that there will be more small, single-use utilities, but you seem to believe that this will decrease the number or importance of traditional long-lived codebases, which doesn't make sense. The fact that Jane Q. Notadeveloper can vibe code an app for tracking household chores is great, but it does not change the fact that she needs to use her operating system (a massive codebase) to open Google Chrome (a massive codebase) and go to her bank's website (a massive codebase) to transfer money to her landlord for rent (a process which involves many massive software systems interacting with each other, hopefully none of which are vibe coded).
The average YouTuber not caring about the aperture of their lens is an apt comparison: the median YouTube video has 35 views[0]. These people likely do not care about their camera or audio setup, it's true. The question is, how is that relevant to the actual professional YouTubers, MrBeast et al, who actually do care about their AV setup?
[0] https://www.intotheminds.com/blog/en/research-youtube-stats/