Comment by 8note

the existence of "legacy code" i think is sufficient evidence that the code is not a sufficiently detailed description of a system. if it were, legacy code would not exist, because any engineer could simply read the code and maintain it like the original authors, without needing to say, talk to stake holders or prior documentation, etc.

we're still going to need well educated, skilled engineers, but the LLM context can store both lower fidelity details - eg. "this needs a list, but who cares if its an array or a linked list" and detail not covered by the running code "this looks like it could be a set, but we didnt do that because ..."