Comment by YZF

In my domain since circa Opus 4.5 LLMs write code as good as most engineers given well defined small enough chunk of work. They refactor. They write tests. These days LLM also debug/troubleshoot better than most engineers.

Are they as good as handcrafted code by 0.1% of top software engineers. Generally no. But neither is 99.9% of real code.

LLMs also are good at code reviews. What they'll miss is often the big picture but they can still catch plenty of issues. I still want to see a human in the loop in my domain.

Totally agree that writing the code was never the bottleneck. We're not seeing massive productivity gains even if some code is written faster. It's not just about understanding but also various other activities that happen in large companies and teams.

Also agree LLMs can be used to gain quality but realistically most orgs are going to aim for "fixed or decreasing" quality at lower costs.