alt Hacker NewsNot trying to be rude, but in a technology you're not familiar with you might not be able to know what good code is, and even less so if it's maintainable.
Finding and fixing that subtle, hard to reproduce bug that could kill your business after 3 years.
Replies
I think we are going to have to find out what maintenance even looks like when LLMs are involved. "Maintainable" might no longer mean quite the same thing as it used to.
But it's not going to be as easy as "just regenerate everything". There are dependencies external to a particular codebase such as long lived data and external APIs.
I also suspect that the stability of the codebase will still matter, maybe even more so than before. But the way in which we define maintainability will certainly change.
The framing is key here. Is three years a long time? Both answers are right. Just getting a business off the ground is an achievement in the first place. Lasting three years? These days, I have clothes that don't even last that long. And then three years isn't very long at all. Bridges last decades. Countries are counted by centuries. Humanity is a millennia old. If AI can make me a company that's solvent for three years? Well, you decide.
That's a fair point, my code is likely to have some warts that an experienced Android/Kotlin dev would wince at. All I know is that the app has a structure that makes an overall sense to me, with my 15+ years of experience as a professional developer and working with many large codebases.