[iammjm]

We are speedrunning legacy "codebases" all the time. Or do you conjure up your own pickaxe, mine your own minerals, produce your own electricity, and construct your own computers and networks first before you go off to develop an application? Would you even know how to do those things? That is all enormous legacy codebase that we speedrun all the time. Just add one more to it.

[discreteevent]

When I use a library someone understood it when they shipped it. It also had a long stabilisation period where bugs were fixed in it. When I use an LLM, potentially nobody understands what was just shipped and it has had no time to stabilise.

[afry1]

I sure don't.

But when I'm using all of those things (pickaxe, mineral mine, power station, internet network hub), I know that there was a thinking human being that took some measure of human care and consideration when creating them. And that there are people on the other side of the economic transaction to talk to or hold accountable when something goes wrong.

[GeoAtreides]

You're talking about layers of abstraction, OP was talking about an ever ballooning mass of code in the same layer of abstraction

[scared_together]

That’s all legacy but none of it is speedrunning.

If we could conjure pickaxes and electric power plants in a single day, that would be speedrunning.