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

i’d say it’s not quite like a compiler because you still need to know what the code does… a compiler you largely don’t care, and it’s deterministic… an LLM hallucinates, so you can’t just trust it, which means you have to be able to assess when it’s doing the wrong thing

i agree that setting an agent going helping you learn a codebase is reasonable, largely because it can quickly point out connections in the code quicker than you can understand the architecture, and its guesses are usually just as good as your guesses until you get knowledgeable with the codebase

however, and that’s a very load-bearing however, i don’t think you should just jump into a codebase and just go ahead and tell the LLM to write new code without understanding what it’s done… the understanding is exactly what this graph is trying to show: actually learning is critical, so your review of the code becomes doubly important: you’re gaining institutional knowledge, and you’re making sure the output isn’t slop

(talking about non-trivial code bases here)

Not being able to understand a code base and needing an agent to do that is one thing (skill issue I guess), but not knowing the intention behind a piece of program is a complete different thing (the agent can't read the mind of the original author on why certain business compromise was made, how the design evolved to this point, ...).

I get the feeling all these people defending vibe coding never worked on a non-trivial project and something that has to live and serve large volume of requests for 5+ years.

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'