[lubujackson]

The thing is AI can maintain systems. The key point is that it can't do this without human intent, but human intent can be encoded into skills and tied together with orchestration.

Rough example: have an LLM generate a plan. Have a skill that refines the plan considering security risks, another that ensures codebase structures are followed, another that considers the infrastructure and usage demands, etc. Then write code and tests. Another process to validate the tests, validate all the above, simplify the logic, etc.

The key is that an LLM can do every task capably, even in a complex system. We simply have not built reasonable orchestration of all the human intent behind each filter, and many of them are constantly in flux. It may be that some elements resist encoding because the complexity of encoding is not worth the hassle to maintain.

For better or worse, managing intent, orchestrating narrow agentic tasks and solidifying patterns into deterministic code (i.e. validation/tests) is going to be the focus of engineers going forward.