alt Hacker News> have the LLM focus and summarize a slice of the system when they need to know about it or ask for it. But.... That's not knowledge? That's just search a la google? And thus seems to be subject to the same problems where the quality of your search dictates the quality of your knowledge that you surface at any given time?
This is the crux. Take pause, because hidden here is a sea-change in our fundamental trust model of software...
There is no longer anyone to turn to if this system breaks by, eg, having a critical bug that no one can figure out. No causal model in anyone's head that can be appealed to, to slowly and methodically debug. By design, the system is too large for that, and everything hinges on Claude itself being able to find and understand the right slice of the system in any situation. As long as that very new invariant holds, everything will be all right. If it fails catastrophically, there is no recovery. You are the owner of a recovered alien spacecraft with tech you have no hope of understanding.
The new trust model is: We trust Claude to always understand the system enough to debug anything or make any reasonable change we could want. The risk might be worth the reward. But it's worth explicitly laying out the deal we're making.
Tbf, it's worth pointing out that many large legacy systems already work like that (sort of), with "Claude" replaced by "whoever happens to be maintaining it this year".
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most large software companies are already too large for anyone to have a complete mental model of.
The idea that someone at say, Google, will be able to fit even half of the system architecture in their heads is not realistic. It also hinges on being able to find and understand the right slice of the system in any situation.
But we have all sorts of guardrails to make that easy - i.e logs, traces, etc
"Tbf, it's worth pointing that many large legacy systems already work like that (sort of), with "Claude" replaced by "whoever happens to be maintaining it this year".
The real difference as I see it is that in the human maintained old style system, the human would take things slowly and ensure they understand any changes. Claude let loose will just say "yes, I know how to do this" and bork the system, because it doesn't have a concept of humbleness in the face of complexity!