[rom1504]

I think the simple answer is LLM cannot do long term planning.

Maintainability means thinking what will happen to this code in the next year and possibly hundreds of changes and based on that selecting the right abstractions that will work in the long term.

LLMs currently cannot do long term planning and specifically cannot pick abstractions that will work in the long term.

I think that's the important problem to solve. Teaching LLMs how to pick the right abstractions.

[satvikpendem]

Why can they not do long term planning? They know what good software design looks like and can code accordingly. Using Fable for a greenfield project for example, it doesn't dump everything into one file but instead does indeed split out the work into logical units as needed.

[rom1504]

Why is a very good question indeed! My guess is we have not figured out how to include long term enough tasks into the RL training.

As to whether they can today, it's pretty easy to figure out that they can't by observing the difference between asking for very high level things like "please make me a website that will be very successful" vs sending it a detailed plans on the goals and many of the specifics and then holding it accountable towards the planning.

Doing appropriate project structure and trying to optimize code quality are definitely good methods to try and increase the chance that the project will succeed long term but I would say they are only methods towards the long term goal and the LLM need to be thinking of the long term goal and how to plan towards that to achieve a much wider and subtile range of methods to achieve long term goals.

[satvikpendem]

/goal and /workflow exists. As I said in another comment, models can do it, as in they have the capacity to do so. It's just the harness that needs to be wired up correctly.