alt Hacker NewsFirst I wasn't sure if technical debt still matters but I think it absolutely does. As long as I'm involved in the planning phase at all, the complexity of the code base still bubbles up to me. Claude will say: ok we can build that but how should we handle legacy code paths A,B,C,D that no one needs and I wasn't even aware existed.
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I think the current LLMs benefit from the modular design, but also from things humans would hate: arbitrary uniqueness. If you have three services, your main() function better just be a single call to a unique function else they're going to slowly lose track of which one you're talking about.
I broke apart a 1k length script into functional components because the local AI just couldn't figure out where edits landed. But once that was complete, it had no problem tweaking features in those scopes.
I think the real TAM is local coding models starting around 32GB sometime in 2027. Obviously, Capitalism gets to decide what we're blessed with but knowing that you can get Qwen3.8-Flash-Next running at around 40GB VRAM with SSD offloading means data centers are either going to become way more efficient, or they're going to die on the vine.
even better when "legacy" means something Claude added without explicit instruction, maybe in the same session, for edge cases that can't happen