Comment by lambda

> but the AI doesn't need this

That's not true. The LLM performance will degrade as the codebase gets messier as well. You get to a point where every fix breaks something else and you can't really make forward progress.

Yes, you might be able to get a bit further with a messy codebase just because the LLM won't complain and will just grind through fixing things, but eventually it will just start disabling failing tests instead of actually fixing things.