Obviously there are mission critical systems where it matters, but if “your code can be A/B tested” or “slowly rolled out”, chances are, it doesn’t matter.
Tech debt is still tech debt, even if there exist models that can wade through, because it's going to require increasingly sophisticated models navigating increasingly large context windows and increasingly speculative workspace operations to keep making progress on it.
Vendors like Anthropic and OpenAI are laying a pit trap when they demonstrate how their models can independently code their whole platform as it becomes increasingly byzantine and inscrutable because not only do they benefit from internal/prerelease models but they have effectively unlimited spend because all that spending acts as a lure to draw you into their trap.
For everybody else, design still matters. People are just working really hard to make you forget.
There are legitimate FAANG-like companies that have general guidelines about “when to use Fable/GLM/DS” and etc. to keep the costs down. And I think it’ll continue that way.
Sometimes, not enough to believe you that you can do it better. And even if you could, to believe that it's overall worth it to work in that way.
It seems too early to make any conclusion like that. We've still only been doing agentic coding for a year and capability significantly improved during that time. I don't think anybody on either side of this debate can have actual empirical evidence to support conclusions about where it lands longer term.
The main argument I see is that it probably pays to be slightly conservative because the cost of being wrong by maintaining too much oversight and shipping slightly less code is better than the cost of ending up with an entirely unmaintainable system. In some cases it will be more than "slightly less" but in almost all complex pre-existing systems, you are rate limited by a lot of other factors outside of code production, so the effective difference just isn't that high.
And it's debatable how much better they will get quickly. Verifiable rewards for maintainability of software is, I think, possible but very hard.
It still applies to all things LLms can do from law to code to art to ideas.
They can do it - and very acceptably - but only to the untrained eye.