> Making software debuggable, maintainable, layered, and composable – that’s still quite a trick. Quite a lot of that work requires extensive, thoughtful reasoning. And that’s where the LLM’s today, even the leading edge of the “capability” from frontier models, fall short.

It’s been my quest during my career to figure out what is maintainable software, what is composable or not, and how the two things, and many other things, are in direct conflict. There is no single answer. If your goal is to take over the market quick, as many here would like, maintainability is a very low priority aspect of your code base. Composability may matter for integrators but can be entirely ignored in your CRUD backend. Beyond that, I don’t know of a good way to measure most of these intangible properties. Highly competent software developers disagree in even basic things, like whether OOP is a good idea, should we all be using pure functional programming etc. Hence, how would you expect an LLM to get good at figuring this out for you? If you describe exactly what trade offs you are willing to make, and give it ways to measure how well it’s doing, then I do think LLMs will be able to not fall short. Given the current state of things, it’s just a matter of opinion whether LLMs fall short, or humans fall short for that matter.