[throwaway7783]

I think we have to wait and see if long term maintainability will be any different from human coded software. Every single long surviving human written codebase I have worked with, has significant amounts of tech debt and large pieces had to be rewritten from time to time. This is of course anecdotal and I'm sure clean and elegant old codebases exist somewhere.

[jongjong]

The worse designed the code, the more frequently it has to be re-factored. I've worked on long running projects which required essentially no refactoring when implementing new features and I've also worked on projects which had to be re-written multiple times to accommodate requirement changes.

[throwaway7783]

In most half-decent codebases, including LLM generated ones, adding new features almost never requires a refactoring in my experience. It is almost always when you are fixing bugs, improving performance or changing core behavior.