> program building is an entropy-decreasing process...program maintenance is an entropy-increasing process, and even its most skillful execution only delays the subsidence of the system into unfixable obsolescence
> Only humans can decrease or resist complexity.
For a simple program, maintenance is naturally entropy-increasing: you add an `if` statement for an edge case, and the total number of paths/states of your program increases, which increases entropy.
But in very large codebases, it's more fluid, and I think LLMs have the potentially to massively _reduce_ the complexity by recommending places where state or logic should be decoupled into a separate package (for example, calling a similar method in multiple places in the codebase). This is something that can be difficult to do "as a human" unless you happen to have worked in those packages recently and are cognizant of the pattern.
> Only humans can decrease or resist complexity.
For a simple program, maintenance is naturally entropy-increasing: you add an `if` statement for an edge case, and the total number of paths/states of your program increases, which increases entropy.
But in very large codebases, it's more fluid, and I think LLMs have the potentially to massively _reduce_ the complexity by recommending places where state or logic should be decoupled into a separate package (for example, calling a similar method in multiple places in the codebase). This is something that can be difficult to do "as a human" unless you happen to have worked in those packages recently and are cognizant of the pattern.