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by jauntywundrkind 4 days ago
Personally I really think LLMs help radically decrease the bus factor, by making it vastly easier to understand code and systems.

Even just reading the code, their ability to ingest colossal amounts & answer questions in incredibly useful. Once you hook them up to observability, DAP (debug anything protocol), a repl, devtools... their ability to augment and accelerate practitioners is amazing.

There can be a lot of oral history that is lost, for sure, that helps illuminate why things are built the way they are, what the intent was. I've always favored a written culture, that has artifacts that help explain the past. Engineers move projects, move companies: trusting the mental model to live in people's heads has a lot of risk and downsides to it.