alt Hacker NewsLet's say that tomorrow, due to an improved model or whatever, we realize that the most efficient form of code of an app - for an llm to understand and work with - is for it to be in one long spaghetti file.
Why wouldn't we do that? I think there's a point where this comes down to values instead of facts. If you want it to be human readable, that's fine and there are a bunch of therefores from that point. But if you don't necessarily want that for a particular codebase, why refactor if the LLMs can handle it?
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nijave • today at 9:15 PM
Vendor lock in
I'd argue the things that make a codebase more human-readable is also what makes it more agent-readable though. Agents are trained on human data, after all.
The position in the article is reasonable because what would end up happening otherwise is:
- Agents increase complexity, humans can't read it anymore
- Agents increase complexity, agent can't read it's own code anymore
- Agent unable to keep making updates without looping forever (the complexity of the code exceeds the agent's context length). Human doesn't understand either so can't fix.
This isn't hypothetical either, it's basically what ends up happening to most vibe-coded software if the person doing the vibe coding doesn't know how to review the outputs being produced.