alt Hacker NewsMaybe, but I think one of the points is that the marginal cost of both understanding that legacy code base and safely refactoring it are increasingly trending down thanks to agentic coding tools. It changed the value and risk tradeoff for legacy apps, if deployed properly. There's still a lot of work (too much) to get the harness in place to make high confidence changes to legacy, critical apps. If someone makes that more automated, we'll be in a very different place for legacy refactoring and it will look a lot more like the clay molding the article discusses.
As with anything LLM-related, I feel compelled to ask, is that actually what's happening, or are they just successfully convincing their users that's what's happening? I truly cannot tell.
I'm not using any LLMs directly (my workplace still bans them in-house) and my experience on the receiving end of contractors using them is quite poor. That includes one major, "we'll replace your ancient software with shiny new stuff"... with significantly reduced capability that in turn makes everything far more difficult than it was or ought to be. The UI appears much more user friendly, but really is just broken in multiple ways where the much-patched 1980s software it replaced was user-unfriendly but largely worked.
This all could be the result of poor coding, regardless of LLM use, of course.