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Comment by clarionbell | Hacker News Reader

I feel like there is an unspoken assumption of long term maintainability when it comes to LLM generated software. We are still very early in this, so I don't want to make assumptions. In principle, it shouldn't be impossible to both write and maintain stable software, purely with agents.

At least, I'm not aware of any actual reasons, backed by a proper theory.

On the other hand. I've noticed some persistent issues with code generated by agents, especially poorly supervised agents. If engineers become less vigilant, agents never get to the point of not needing supervision and juniors never pick up required skills, this could lead to real trouble.

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> long term maintainability

Did business ever cared about this? Like ever?.. I've seen too many code bases with awful code by humans, now AI simply exacerbated the issue but this is nothing new in our field.

I just don't see how this is going to be a battle engineering departments can win. As long as AI is brining money to the business, they are not going to listen.

LLMs aren't perfect and they have problems, but often they write better code than humans. At least this human.

It seems they run into problems with larger concepts and general organization and need guidance at the moment but for a single code file they often do better then I would have.

If an LLM writes better code than you, that says more about you than anything else (either your ability to write code or your ability to evaluate LLMs). The code they write is garbage.

They write garbage if you turn off your brain. They write code as good as yours if you work together.

I broadly agree with you about improving quality through working together. But even with tons of discussion, they still write code that seems fine from a distance but is weird when you actually get down to actually reading it and thinking about it, line by line. It is not junk but sure as hell I can write tighter and cleaner code and I am a very mediocre programmer. The abundance and frequency of "what, why?!" and "why not just..." reactions I have at LLM code throughout the day has made that much clear to me.

> The code they write is garbage.

This is trolling right?

No. Sometimes they produce code that's ok in small units, but definitely not all the time.

If you write more good code by hand than by agent in 2026 that says more about you than anything else (either your ability to give instructions or your ability to delegate). The code they write is above average.

I agree with everything you said.

I’m simply playing devil’s advocate, because engineers can believe one thing, but until employers believe it, it doesn’t matter much.

I’m also not convinced that the reality of LLMs will never catch up with what employers think they can do.

It may never happen, but it very well could.

Either way, I feel the days of employers being ok with handwriting code are limited.

The complexity of code is combinatorial. Code is harder to understand than it is to create. The LLMs will be creating code that they will not (nor will any human) be able to understand later, or it won't be the same understanding that was used to create it. We'll find that systems that were created with LLM code will be impossible for LLMs to contextualize, or will be cost-prohibitive to do so.

The wages for the LLM will increase as the codebase gets larger, the only inhibitor is how fast customers are willing to pay for new features. I don't think that cost ever goes higher than human wages for maintainable software.

In theory (never happens) the software will become feature complete and you only pay the LLM for security updates.

It's a moot point. In Mag7 companies internal code gets thrown away within 2 years on average because of contract negotiations, new opensource projects that obviate need for the internal codebase, license changes, layoffs, etc, etc. We don't need long term maintainability because its already on its way to the garbage bin. Frankly it's always been this way.

Its' the exact opposite ... Google, nVidia, Amazon, Apple, etc. all have a deep bench of code that is a moat. They have lots of throwaway code too, but those companies are precisely the ones that pay attention to code quality, and comprehensibility by experts

A rough proxy for this would be if they say contribute to the C++ standards process, which Google Microsoft nVidia do, and basically zero "normal" companies (say SaaS) do. It means they are investing in multi-decade maintenance of their codebase

"Contribute" is an interesting word, since those companies are so big they can just dictate the standards they prefer. Also they are so big and have so much cash pouring in that they can afford to pay employees with nothing better to do than spend time drafting C++ standards. The average normal SaaS company is hoping they can make payroll next month.

Is google still a big contributor to the c++ standard? I thought they are far less involved than a decade ago.

I’m talking back of house, you’ve sort of mistakenly missed my point and made a rebuttal to some completely different question and I agree with you.

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