alt Hacker NewsI have a similar position - maintainability of code written by AI no longer matters in any meaningful way, as as the models advance, one simply rewrites.
At the current pace, the very idea of maintaining software will become as relevant as the idea of trimming wicks, stropping razors - or making every frame you take with a camera count.
When the marginal cost of replacement drops to a sufficiently low level, the entire paradigm changes.
I say this as someone with 30+ years of development experience, who built everything to be maintained until the heat death of the universe. I just don't think it's a relevant question in this brave new world.
Interesting analogy choices. Aren’t straight razors still the highest quality shave? We go with electric and cartridge because it’s faster and cheaper and takes less skill to get a decent result
Digital cameras are another interesting one. Since capturing images is so cheap we just snap a bunch of frames without a lot of thought towards composing them carefully, with a side effect that we get an overwhelming amount of mediocre frames and a few good ones, but we have to sift through.
I’m still not convinced I want to make this tradeoff in programming. But I work in scientific computing where I think it’s (still) really important to understand what modeling assumptions you are making through code