Comment by throwaway7783
2 days ago
"unless you're content with producing low quality work." - With the right guiding hand, it is a productivity multiplier without compromising quality. As a fully autonomous developer, it is a disaster.
2 days ago
"unless you're content with producing low quality work." - With the right guiding hand, it is a productivity multiplier without compromising quality. As a fully autonomous developer, it is a disaster.
> With the right guiding hand, it is a productivity multiplier without compromising quality
This just reads like another variation of “it’s the user not the tool,” which is just endless runway for always blaming people and never acknowledging the limitations of LLM’s.
I’d be curious to hear how the recipients of your work enabled by the “productivity multiplier” feel about the quality.
Yes. It is always people. Every tool will have limitations, including LLMs.
We actually have trendlines on user reported bugs, and I am happy to report they show a significant downtrend.
You can't play an entire orchestra's sheet music on a single guitar either, but your playing ability still matters a lot.
I would say that as of July 2026, with the right scaffolding, you can get reasonably good output out of a LLM, or better a combination of LLMs. For example, it pays off to prepare an implementation plan with one LLM and then let another LLM check it for flaws, then again. After several iterations like this, you will have a plan better than whatever you could come up with yourself.
It often is the user and not the tool. LLMs are complicated, have nontrivial failure modes, and the user needs to steer them carefully. They might be the most complicated tools on the planet right now.
Anecdotally, the recipients of my work have become visibly more happy in the last months. LLMs are great at diagnosing subtle problems which tend to appear at Friday night only, and this is the sort of problem that bugs actual people the most.
> I would say that as of July 2026, with the right scaffolding, you can get reasonably good output out of a LLM, or better a combination of LLMs.
Totally agree, I don’t think I said or implied otherwise.
And yes can it can be the user and often even is, but when it comes to any LLM conversation I’ve been a part of it seems people think the only answer is “you’re using it wrong.” Evangelists swear it’s a 100x multiplier and anything counter to that means you’re either a Luddite who is blinded by politics or are too dumb to use the tool.
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How are junior devs becoming qualified “guiding hands” these days? If the expert with LLM assistance is multiplied, what’s a company’s incentive to pay for a junior, and how would they train to get good in these conditions?
I agree on this one. Junior developers are not yet good guiding hands yet. But for the motivated junior developers LLMs are a great onboarding and learning tool. A good senior engineer must still guide, and there are very large gaps on how it's being done
Juniors are still useful, but not as pure "coders". The juniors you want to hire now can wear product, engineering and QA hats, and are self starters with good attention to detail and AI skills. These types of people are actually a bargain.
Yes, but very few people are on that edge of product and technology. From that angle LLMs are destroying the junior engineer dev market
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I produce code that is significantly higher quality with the assistance of coding agents, because I no longer succumb to the temptation to cut corners due to lack of time.
One example: everything I do is properly tested and documented now, even the most trivial of changes. Previously I would have weighed those tradeoffs and sometimes decided not to bother with the tests because they weren't worth the time.
> because I no longer succumb to the temptation to cut corners due to lack of time
No offense, but that says much more about the way you approach programming than about the quality of LLM outputs.
In my experience, LLMs are the ultimate corner-cutting tool. With LLMs, I now succumb to the temptation to cut corners, build something I haven't properly researched and don't fully understand, prioritize shipping quantity over quality.
Without LLMs, I have to understand the domain and the tools and ultimately my full solution (with all its warts and limitations). When I really care about the project and consider it "my baby", LLMs are out of the picture.
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