alt Hacker News> developer’s perspective is becoming increasingly unimportant as LLMs become the main readers and writers of the code.
Until the LLM itself becomes confused by the 10 layers of old patterns that weren't fully deleted from the code base, 5 of which do more or less the same thing but in minutely different ways that cause issues.
I don’t think you shouldn’t go and clean up dead code and ensure that you have code reuse, as it probably does help the LLM somewhat. I just don’t think that it needs to be as strict as we’re used to for human consumption. And the LLMs will get better at both reading such messy codebases and not making a mess as time goes on. Assuming of course, that not making a mess even helps.