I can do more projects in parallel than I could have before. Which means that I have even more work now… The support and maintenance costs of the code itself are the same, as long as you maintain constant vigilance to make sure nothing bad gets merged. So the costs are moved from development to review. It’s a lot easier to produce thousands of lines of slop which then have to be reviewed and loads of suggestions made. It’s easy for bad taste to be amplified, which is a real cost that might not be noticed that much.
There are some evals which work on large codebases (e.g. “fix this bug in django”), but those are the minority, granted. They can help with the scaffolding, though—those tend to be large projects in which a Claude can help find things.
But yeah, large files are ok if you just want to find something, but somewhere under 500 loc seems to be the limit of what will work well. Though you can get round it somewhat by copying the parts to be changed to a different file then copying them back, or other hacks like that...
I can do more projects in parallel than I could have before. Which means that I have even more work now… The support and maintenance costs of the code itself are the same, as long as you maintain constant vigilance to make sure nothing bad gets merged. So the costs are moved from development to review. It’s a lot easier to produce thousands of lines of slop which then have to be reviewed and loads of suggestions made. It’s easy for bad taste to be amplified, which is a real cost that might not be noticed that much.
There are some evals which work on large codebases (e.g. “fix this bug in django”), but those are the minority, granted. They can help with the scaffolding, though—those tend to be large projects in which a Claude can help find things.
But yeah, large files are ok if you just want to find something, but somewhere under 500 loc seems to be the limit of what will work well. Though you can get round it somewhat by copying the parts to be changed to a different file then copying them back, or other hacks like that...