in my experience, what happens is the code base starts to collapse under its own weight. it becomes impossible to fix one thing without breaking another. the coding agent fails to recognize the global scope of the problem and tries local fixes over and over. progress gets slower, new features cost more. all the same problems faced by an inexperienced developer on a greenfield project!

has your experience been otherwise?

The whole point of good engineering was not about just hitting the hard specs, but also have extendable, readable, maintainable code.

But if today it’s so cheap to generate new code that meets updated specs, why care about the quality of the code itself?

Maybe the engineering work today is to review specs and tests and let LLMs do whatever behind the scenes to hit the specs. If the specs change, just start from scratch.