[nz]

This is interesting. I have always preferred to make my personal projects single-file (or at least few-massive-file)[1]. I noticed that teams in general, strongly dislike this style of programming (even before LLM-coding-assistants, as far back as 2020).

I wonder how much of the multi-file (and increasingly multi-repo) code-organization is just a manifestation of Conway's Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law).

[1]: It makes navigation and iteration much faster, and obviates the need to use indexers. It also forces you to only put _orthogonal_ programs in external files (I recently had to write a kind of quasi-SAT-solver, and that was code that was complex enough to require its own "namespace", and it was also something that was reusable across projects). One thing I noticed, maybe in 2025, is that LLMs struggled to navigate large single-file programs, but were quite good at navigating multi-file programs. It is interesting that they (according to my 2025 experience and the quote you give) prefer to _write_ code in ways that make it difficult for them to _read_ code.