>how could the maintainers understand their codebase if most of it was not directly written by them

I think you are not understanding the new paradigm. The idea that 'humans are going to understand the codebase' is dead. Codebases will be maintained and reviewed by AI. You might think this is bad, but in many aspects of human history, we have traded understanding for convenience—that's the reason why we buy food at the supermarket instead of hunting for our meal. This has happened in every area of humanity, and it seems foolish to think that code generation would be immune.

Again, you might think this is a bad thing, but it’s simply how humanity has been functioning. 'Oh, but who is going to maintain this?' AI. 'Oh, but what if one day that's not possible?' Well, what if one day the electricity goes out due to solar flame or whatever? You get it?

> in many aspects of human history, we have traded understanding for convenience—that's the reason why we buy food at the supermarket instead of hunting for our meal.

You could always take a job on a cattle ranch or an abattoir or meat-packing plant, or watch a How It's Made documentary, and get some understanding of how the sausage gets made and put on the supermarket shelf for your convenience. This was also true as we built abstractions in computer technology: you could start off learning a high level language, then learn a lower level one, then study or build an operating system kernel, a compiler, an assembler, machine code, and then crack some books on microprocessor architecture and signal processing. You could always "go deeper" if you wanted to. And there is a payoff: understanding at a deeper level helps you get things done better at the higher levels (e.g.: understanding the concept of memory hierarchy helps you lay out data structures to make code faster).

There is no such step for slop-coded codebases: you become entirely dependent on a context-limited LLM to have a shot at even approximating some understanding. Perhaps more productively, you treat the slop as a black box and build something understandable around it.

This is also why the notion that developers in the future will be committing LLM prompts in English to repositories instead of code written in a programming language is so foolish. I am saying this as someone who uses LLMs quite a lot to help with generating and understanding code.

What are you talking about? How do you think food get to the supermarket? People put it there.

The entire chain from farm to table is managed and operated by humans.

Every automatization effort ever always had human oversight.

Its not the same thing as entrusting the entire codebase to overachieving markov-chain who has no concept of correctness over anything of sounding ok.

Honestly, saying the humans understanding codebase is a dead concept is the most techbro-ish I heard today.

THIS time it’s different.

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