You got it entirely backwards. Readability becomes far more important with the size of your project.
When you get a bug report of a feature request, you need to dive into the code and update the relevant bits. With big projects, odds are you will need to change bits of the code you never knew they existed. The only way that's possible is if the code is clear and it's easy to sift through, understand, and follow.
> You need a system of code management (documentation, diagram, IDE, tests, etc), to explain in a human-friendly way what the hell is going on.
That system of code management is the code itself. Any IDE supports searching for references, jump to definitions, see inheritance chains, etc. Readable code is code that is easy to navigate and whose changes are obvious.
As someone who has read 10,000+ lines in order to track down surprising behavior in other people's code, I can say without a doubt that readability still matters at that scale.
Code management systems can sometimes be helpful, but they are no substitute.
Ravioli code is a real problem though. Saying small chunks are readable is not enough. The blast radius of a five byte change can be fifteen code paths and five million requests per hour.
I think this is where AI could be helpful in explaining and inspecting large codebases, as an assist to a developer.
That's a great point. Everyone lauds the benefits of chatgpt/copilot in generating new code, but I'm starting to learn that the places they might shine is onboarding onto projects and preliminary code reviews. What LlMs excel at is context, and they should excel in activities where context-awareness is key.
A number-crunching app or a data processing pipeline packed with spaghetti business logic is far harder ti read.
>A project with a state machine, commands, strategy patterns, etc requires an awful lot of repetitive boilerplate.
Yeah, good thing we're not a java shop...