> I get almost physically ill when I work on a project with more source code files or at least general architecture than I can keep in my head, so I don’t get anything out of expanded scope
While I sympathize with your loss, this was always going to prevent you from holding down a job, even as a pre-LLM "coder." The majority of us have to work on systems, not just single files or cleanly isolated programs we can hold in our head.
Perhaps I didn't formulate this too well. Say, rustc is a gigantic program, but the parser alone, or the borrow checker alone, or the LLVM backend alone are small enough to work on individually, and from the perspective of any such unit all the others can be treated as black boxes, deliberately designed to have as small of a public API surface as reasonable and to be as predictable as possible. That's just architecture 101. With LLM code, I notice, such abstractions fall apart, and the interconnectedness, duplicated code, and unclear expectations make it impossible to reason about the result except as a giant lump. Of course, tech debt is nothing new, but at least it used to be held back by the physical inability to make progress once things get dire; with LLMs, this misery gets prolonged.
I don't think this statement implies they meant 'single files'? They could be talking about complex systems that they could fit into their head, and now they can't do that with new workflows.