That's how it works for humans. And, sure, LLMs are severely human-adjacent. But they aren't human.

An LLM can just re-ingest the entire codebase every time it wants to make a change - open it up, find the relevant parts, derive how a well structured, maintainable change should look like from them, then make that change. The way a compiler can just re-ingest the entire codebase every time it wants to make a binary.

The intermediates are a cache - a resource optimization, not an outcome optimization. Is it wasteful not to have a cache? Maybe. Can you get away with not having it? Yes.

And, the more maintainable a codebase is, the easier it is for an LLM to "re-ingest" it from scratch. Or for a human to get onboarded. There's some overlap there.