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But 1 and 2 were rarely true pre-LLMs, not in any code that has substantial active development. Because 3 months later, the fluxtron renoberator module has been modified, fixed and refactored by 5 other people and looks little like Alice remembers it, and Bob, well, he could never shift attention and actually understand it, nor could anyone else, because that's just a nice story we told ourselves that never worked in practice.

by jghn6 hours ago|

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> But 1 and 2 were rarely true pre-LLMs, not in any code that has substantial active development.

Every large project I ever worked on worked exactly this way. What do you mean it was rare?

by skydhash6 hours ago|

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> But 1 and 2 were rarely true pre-LLMs, not in any code that has substantial active development.

I'm ready to bet that is untrue. Sure, no one can recite the code, but people can quickly scan the module and refresh their memory as well as understanding the new changes, even after a while. If not, collaboration would have been impossible.

> Because 3 months later, the fluxtron renoberator module has been modified, fixed and refactored by 5 other people and looks little like Alice remembers it

I don't know for which type of projects those things happen, but good design can have a long staying power. Drastic refactoring in a short period is a clear sign of bad engineering.

> and Bob, well, he could never shift attention and actually understand it, nor could anyone else, because that's just a nice story we told ourselves that never worked in practice.

A lot of OpenSource projects are decades old, and while some core maintainers can stay for the lifetime of the project, new contributors came, understood the code, made changes, then left. Same for hires in companies.

by jcelerier5 hours ago|

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> I'm ready to bet that is untrue. Sure, no one can recite the code, but people can quickly scan the module and refresh their memory as well as understanding the new changes, even after a while. If not, collaboration would have been impossible.

I don't understand this part. When I was doing freelance consulting, my job was quite often "come to our office, scan this 40 million lines codebase and fix stuff for the next week". It was never a problem to read and get up to speed completely unknown codebases if you have basic programming ability. Much harder to do something that fits floaty business objectives though.