How meaningful can this be? For example: - LLM generates code for a web api but initially ignores security concerns and some other requirements - you notice this and prompt the LLM to improve the code - the LLM takes security into account - the day after, you give another task to the LLM and it again ignores security practices you mentioned earlier. And so on.
If an intern were to do this, you would take them aside and strongly recommend to learn from past experiences and suggestion, but this doesn’t seem possible with LLMs.
This is one point where the maintainability comes in. The other is in having anyone who knows and understands the code base. With your comparison, there is a sr eng around. Today, I have sr eng friends who haven't looked at their own code in weeks, have no idea what's in there (friend is doing an experiment in pushing vibe coding to the limits at a shitty corpo job).
What happens when no one knows what's the code even looks like, let alone how it works?