Post by @FaceDeer@fedia.io

2026-09-15 03:11 UTC

Nobody's asking what happens in Month 18 when the original dev has left and nobody understands the codebase. Throughout my career, I've often had to sync a git repository for some random project that I've never worked with before and then had to muddle through whatever was in there hoping that the documentation was vaguely complete and accurate. Nowadays it's actually much easier. If the documentation isn't complete or accurate I just turn my coding agent loose on it and tell it to write the documentation. I get the impression that the guy writing this hasn't actually used modern coding agents, this is not a problem. I see coding AI as being similar to a compiler. Before compilers came along programmers had to work in assembly language. Nowadays very few programmers ever do anything in assembly and that's perfectly fine.

Replies (2)

@BlueEther@no.lastname.nz 2026-09-15 04:24

I’m no dev, but did do my HND in computing some 25 years ago. I have also tinkered with scripts to solve an itch and have has plenty of VBA and of late DAX and power query. I did a project for myself around a year ago that was much larger than I normally would these days and I used Gemini. It was a constant battle with the LLM (man it’s hard not to gender and personify these LLMs) to keep it on track and not keep breaking shit all the time. It struggled to writ valid rules for it’s own firebase/firestore. It generally felt like a bad time. This past week end I got codex to migrate the PWA from google’s services and database into a selfhostable docker stack. It was a pleasure, it documented the whole process map, built a full test environment, followed through and imported my data. It the suggested a few improvements. It even rewrote a a complex equation that Gemini could nust not get correct and added manufacture safe/max bounds. all this to say ‘yes, modern agents do seem to do a good job of a codebase that they have never seen’

Open ##4698921
@dylanTheDeveloper@lemmy.world 2026-09-15 15:20

Yeah your right, at the very least its great at untangling 10 years worth of interns working on a codebase.

Open ##4706403