Have you ever taken the time to read hundreds of pages of documentation to fully understand a massive codebase? Neither have I. You learn it by working with it all day, and you're careful with it. A complete "knowledge base" of business logic is, itself, indistinguishable from code. Code that no one can or will read and learn unless they have to be immersed in it.

So the "knowledge base" an LLM generates is not useful as code, nor is it useful to humans. It may be useful to other LLMs as a lossy compression scheme for the original intention of the business logic and code.

That's not even in the same universe as institutional knowledge. Handing any serious business to something like that is malpractice, and sloppy beyond belief.

I'm not surprised that a lot of people think this way, because they never really grasped the benefit of holistic business knowledge united with code to begin with. Those people always outsourced, always got shitty code, and never really unified their systems. Cheap people and cheap companies take cheap exits. That's fine. But yes, many fragmented humans who all understand their portion in depth is much better than a bunch of markup files at retaining the knowledge of why things are done, procedurally, the way they are.

Once every six months the CEO calls me and asks me to remind him why our software does something like, idk, create a reverse payment instead of voiding a charge in some situation. Or some other thing he has asked a dozen times before. And I know the answer to why, or I know where to look, because I was in those meetings 5 years ago or because I wrote the code myself and asked the question when I wrote it.

Institutional knowledge is a very large context window, if you need to think of it that way, and LLMs are a shitty compression method for that. They can tell you how, but they don't reason well with why.