> LLMs will never manage to deal with large code bases 'autonomously'

Absolutely nothing about that statement is concrete or falsifiable.

Hell, you can already deal with large code bases 'autonomously' without LLMs - grep and find and sed goes a long way!

Seems falsifiable to me? If an LLM (+harness) is fully maintaining a project, updating things when dependencies update, handling bug reports, etc., in a way that is considered decent quality by consumers of the project, then that seems like it would falsify it.

Now, that’s a very high bar, and I don’t anticipate it being cleared any time soon.

But I do think if it happened, it would pretty clearly falsify the hypothesis .