alt Hacker News> When an engineer writes code manually, two parallel processes occur. The first is production: characters appear in files, tests get written, systems change. The second is absorption: mental models form, edge cases become intuitive, architectural relationships solidify into understanding.
That absorption only takes place in the mind of that individual, unfortunately. That doesn't help when they no longer work there or are on vacation.
The ideal situation is the solo open source project. You wrote all 200K lines of code yourself, and will maintain them until death. :)
Someone taking over a project and working directly in it can build up their own deep understanding about it over time even if they didn't write it all. Documentation from the last expert can help, or just reading and changing things as you build up a mental model. But asking an LLM to change it for you will not arrive at the same place.