alt Hacker NewsThat's the entire point of the "maintainable" part: someone with no "memory" of what was written where and why should be able to walk into the codebase, understand how it works, and be able to make a sensible change to it without setting things on fire.
Someone with "memory" should be able to do the same faster, but having that memory should not be a requirement.
Whether that "someone" is a freshly onboarded mid-level SWE or a mid-tier coding LLM is largely irrelevant.
Depends what you mean by your comment then, if you want to say that you can direct LLMs to write maintainable code yes sure you can through very strict guardrails, if they can do it themselves, no they can't and need help because of their bad memory.