[skybrian]

This seems very similar to the situation of a new employee dropped into a large codebase of varying quality. It seems like similar techniques will get you out of the mess?

Also, you can ask the coding agent for help at understanding it, unlike the old days when whoever wrote it is long gone.

[lstodd]

Only the coding agent will only give you plausible answers, not necessarily correct ones. So read the code. Oh, but you now can't because all you know is how to ask coding agents.

[skybrian]

You can ask it to read over all the commits to tell a story about what happened, backing that up by quoting the code and linking to the changes in the commits. Then you can read the code yourself and see what it did.

You could also ask it to write bits of code to do experiments to figure out what the code really does. Then you could reproduce the same experiment.

These things are pretty similar to what a human might do to reverse-engineer a program. Some skills might atrophy a bit, but the idea that this makes you helpless is a fallacy.

But what is more broadly true is that as we adopt new technologies we depend on them more and more, and eventually start removing the backups. I'm old enough to remember when people didn't have Internet and saw Internet service gradually change from a luxury to a necessity. Eventually people cancel their landlines. Eventually, you can't get a new landline even if you wanted to.