I hope that at some point companies start competing on quality instead of speed. LLMs will never be able to understand a codebase, and the more capable they get the more dangerous it is to just hand them the permission to blindly implement functionality and fix bugs. Bugs should be going down but they seem more prevalent than ever.
They already are competiting on quality. Why do you think Claude made Opus slower than Sonnet, yet with better benchmark scores.
LLMs do understand codebases and I've been able to get them to make reactors and clean up code without them breaking anything due to them understanding what they are doing.
Bugs are being solved faster than before. Crashes from production can directly be collected and fixed by a LLM with no engineering time needed other than a review.
They are trained on other code, ignore how your codebase is structured, and lack knowledge of it. To do so, you would need to feed the whole codebase every time you ask it for something, with extensive comments about the style, architecture, and so on. No amount of md files will help with that.
In large codebases, they struggle with code reuse, unless you point the agent to look for specific code.
Finding bugs has nothing to do with understanding the codebase. They find local bugs. If they could understand the whole codebase, we would be finding RCEs for popular OSS projects so easily, including browsers.
