Nice! I actually ran across this paper+benchmark recently, too. It's the first I've found that start to aim at some of the non-functional and longitudinal requirements that I think have always been an important part of writing production code.

It's especially relevant now that models are good enough to solve ~most point-in-time problems.

Some relevant but disconnected thoughts:

- deterministic scores are so nice

- what "maintainable" is is probably some high dimensional space described by these signals; it'd probably require some human labeling to figure out where this space is

- another signal I've been thinking about and I'm seeing increasingly get brought up is the state space of a system; I'm seeing formal methods pop up a lot recently

> another signal I've been thinking about and I'm seeing increasingly get brought up is the state space of a system

State space of a system AND the way to make it accessible / visible to a model. Many times a model can work magic if it can "see" the state of a system in a way that suits it. That's why sometimes having a cli added to the environment seems like such a big unlock. Because that cli usually takes a complex state and allows visibility into it, and possible manipulation in a structured way.

> - what "maintainable" is is probably some high dimensional space described by these signals; it'd probably require some human labeling to figure out where this space is

this is a nicely succinct way to put this - a multi-dimensional space where no single metric is really useful

state space of the system is interesting too. I would guess that for any production software with dependencies like databases/third parties that might be too hard to measure, but if you can silo off parts of your system into bounded state machines, it may be a value metric on some module behind a clean interface.

I think the kubernetes control loop model is a great instance of this, a handful of scoped components that own a control loop across a well-defined state machine, that can operate / recover in the face of most network partitions or downtime - the promise of CRDTs but rather more a pragmatic approach to it