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01HNNWZ0MV43FF • yesterday at 2:17 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

If humans can't maintain a 10,000 file 40 million LoC code base, then three things are true:

1. We haven't learned anything from Google, who maintained Chromium and Android before LLMs

2. Your LLM is not generating code as maintainable as Chromium and Android (which are gigantic open-source projects that probably 99% of your devs have used)

3. Your company has no faith or interest in teaching devs how to maintain code nor how to build maintainable code

And that's pretty pathetic. It's solvable, but it's pathetic.

I will be amused if those 3 points lead to this conclusion:

4. If you aren't asking your LLMs to write maintainable code, and they aren't smart enough to do it by default, you are pretty quickly gonna hit a brick wall where your LLMs are also just slopping mud onto the big ball of mud. Then nothing will save you, if your leads haven't heard of "quality".

(Yes, this is projection. Yes, I'm late for work)


Replies

snoman • yesterday at 6:47 PM

What does “maintainable” mean in a world where people aren’t even reading the code that gets merged?

There are companies telling their developers that they’ll never write code again. They manage agents now. It’s like asking PMs how maintainable the codebase is.