Comment by fauigerzigerk
25 days ago
>I do not care how software gets built. Only that it works.
I mean, I agree on a very high level of abstraction. But my problem is that I need to understand how software gets built so that I can have confidence in my ability to maintain and evolve the project.
I need to understand whether a feature is easy to add or requires a wholesale rewrite of the entire codebase, which comes with risks. I need to understand how new features affect existing users.
I also need to understand the economics of the process and the economics of my industry. That means I have to care to some degree about how software gets made, not just whether some specific program works at the present moment.
If you give me a choice between an implementation that is 100 LOC I can understand and an implementation that is a million LOC that I can never understand, I'm going to chose the former, even if both implementations pass all tests.
> that I can never understand
this is not a thing. there hasn't been a single line of code written that a human can't understand.
I may be able understand any given line of code but not necessarily all of them. The capacity of AI to generate code will quickly exceed human capacity to read and understand it.
Also, code quality matters for AI as well. Maintaining a million lines of code requires more tokens than maintaining 100 lines of code.