This makes sense to me. When updating anything beyond a small project, keeping things reliable and mantainable for the future is 10x more important than just solving the immediate bug or feature. Short term hacks add up and become overwhelming at some point, even if each individual change seems manageable at the time.
I used to work as a solo contractor on small/early projects. The most common job opportunity I encountered was someone who had hired the cheapest offshore devs they could find, seen good early progress with demos and POCs, but over time things kept slowing down and eventually went off the rails. The codebases were invariably a mess of hacks and spaghetti code.
I think the best historical comp to LLMs is offshore outsourcing, except without the side effect of lifting millions of people out of poverty in the third world.
I used to work as a solo contractor on small/early projects. The most common job opportunity I encountered was someone who had hired the cheapest offshore devs they could find, seen good early progress with demos and POCs, but over time things kept slowing down and eventually went off the rails. The codebases were invariably a mess of hacks and spaghetti code.
I think the best historical comp to LLMs is offshore outsourcing, except without the side effect of lifting millions of people out of poverty in the third world.