Software Entropy and the Future of Code Maintenance

A possible future: For the last 30 years, devs have made the sensible assumption that every time a human touches a codebase under time pressure, the codebase gets less maintainable. This is called software entropy. It's only possible to escape by continual monitoring and improvement. Or by employing ONLY 10x devs (impossible). The current generation of LLMs aren't currently good enough to escape software entropy. Without careful supervision, they make codebases worse. But soon, they will be good enough that they will make the codebase better each time they touch it. At that point, we won't need human review any more. Codebases will be better as a black box. We'll review inputs and outputs. Before Opus 4.5, models produced software entropy at an alarming rate. Opus 4.5 was the first time I felt like the entropy was manageable. Soon, there might not be any entropy at all.