> It can infer why something may have been written in a particular way, but it (currently) does not have access to the actual/point-in-time reasoning the way an

> It can infer why something may have been written in a particular way, but it (currently) does not have access to the actual/point-in-time reasoning the way an actual engineer/maintainer would. Is that really true? A human programmer has hidden states, i.e. what is going on in their head cannot be fully recovered by just looking at the output. And that's why "Software evolves more rapidly under the maintenance of its original creator, and in proportion to how recently it was written", as is astutely observed by the author. But transformer based LLMs do not have this hidden state. If you retain the text log of your conservation with an LLM, you can reproduce its inner layer outputs exactly. In that regard, an LLM is actually much better than humans.