You maintain the code the same way those other people maintain their code, testing. They aren't doing anything special here, you still have to write tests (well, you can get GPT to write some of them for you). The upside here is you are the one in control of this and you can change and test to your specific needs. You are not relying on external library who has to appeal to a general huge variety of use cases. You also don't have to deal with a lot of external time-wasters, as you're only working internally so you aren't at the whims of whether or not that group can even work on implementing your change. Plus, no more random changes that catch you by surprise when you're reading the change log.
>Keep asking ChatGPT to fix it when things break?
Hah, maybe some day we will get to that point. Until then we still need to know what is happening, however, you might be surprised to find out how infrequently things require that much input seeing as you aren't at the whims of random other parties constantly.
I suggest code obfuscation and other acts of tribal knowledge hoarding for job security. ;)
A self contained bundle of software with no external dependencies cannot break, because it has no externally changing parts, that should be obvious.
After all, why bother dealing with so many external libraries to get it done when you can just relay the core ones you must use and ask chatgpt to flesh out the rest in a way that suits your needs? Need a component to be gamepad accessible written in Vue? Ask and you'll receive. No more bothering with that library that hasn't been updated in years or wasting time figuring out if x package is stable enough.
Same with endpoints, no having to sort through 30 different sites and navigating horrible menus to potentially see a comment where someone says "oh the endpoint changed it's actually x". Even if chatgpt gets it wrong, it's so much faster to just tell it that the endpoint is wrong or whatever the error you're actually getting.
Like you mentioned though the big caveat is to know what you're working with. Without that you're going to waste a lot of time not knowing where chatgpt is going wrong. That will probably improve eventually, but if you're trying to learn a new programming language through it, you will likely be holding yourself back or learning very odd patterns.