most large software companies are already too large for anyone to have a complete mental model of.

The idea that someone at say, Google, will be able to fit even half of the system architecture in their heads is not realistic. It also hinges on being able to find and understand the right slice of the system in any situation.

But we have all sorts of guardrails to make that easy - i.e logs, traces, etc

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jonahx 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Right, that's what I alluded to in my last sentence.

It is true that this gamble has existed in the form you mention for many years. Still, I sense something new here, both in scale and in the attitude of trust. Also, I find those massive, incomprehensible human-built systems frightening too.

	▲	dasil003 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Having worked continuously this decade on one massively complex consumer facing app that interacts heavily with real-world scenarios, I can say that the problems of cohesion existed well before the agentic revolution. Tons of features built by myopic teams simply because they couldn't understand enough of the system (both online and offline, meat-space interactions) to make good design decisions. AI actually helps here by being able to perform deeper reading and analysis than any human can do. But then the risk is that it can also produce way more random non-cohesive features. So far I kind of feel like it nets out to the same bottleneck being good judgment from decision makers. And you might say, no, leadership will just put more and more pressure to add more complexity just because we can and it makes it appear that we are moving fast. But when it comes to real-world apps, there is a backstop which is that things that are too complex and illegible end up not being fit-for-purpose for human problems. Claude Code and other general purpose AI tools are not like this, because they are literally trying to optimize it for every single kind of knowledge work with zero constraints on use case or target audience other than chasing the next juiciest one they can with essentially unlimited resource. 99% of software is not like this, and when the dust settles I suspect software won't be anywhere near as different as the doomers or the maxxers are predicting right now.