Comment by ozozozd
18 days ago
I’ve developed a similar sense about maintainability becoming more important with LLMs. I have no hard data. Just feels that way.
Can you elaborate a little bit on how you get the LLM to produce maintainable code? Any tricks other than better prompting?
Just explicitly prioritize separation of concerns, with strict API modularity between them. Breaking everything into single concern chunks with good APIs. It’s less about re-use, and more about containment . Documentation, and testability. Also invest more time in ensuring that your data structures are a mirror of the solution space. That will pay huge dividends with better code.
These things have alerted been true, but now they also enable AI development so instead of accumulating technical debt for expedience sake, we get paid an efficiency subsidy in productivity for doing it right. ( or rather for herding the gerbils to do it right)