Why would it not be a waste of energy for an LLM? It must still be a waste, but perhaps the cost of the waste is so low that it’s much easier to justify
replyYes, the cost of fixing it when the actual problem arises is IMO lower than the cost of spending energy and human time up front to make it maintainable and extensible. I know it sounds crazy when I write it out like that, but this is something I've been thinking a lot about recently. Agentic coding is a paradigm shift and we have to rethink a lot about what use to make sense.
replyI know it’s kind of a hot take and it might also be hazardous to my career if I’m right, but I kind of agree. If you create a code base that has some significant flaws, and a bug or change request arises later, it is definitely possible that “Super Fable” or GPT-7 Multiverse or whatever can, for $500 of tokens or whatever, perform a refactor of all the related modules, and create and thoroughly test all the necessary data migrations, as a prerequisite to fixing the bug.
replyI also think that if we’re being completely fair here, we have to acknowledge that most codebases that are more than a couple of years old are giant piles of tech debt already even with 100% human code. At least in all of my jobs, none of which were FAANG, nor run by extremely elite engineers. YMMV.