Also another view is that developers below a certain level get a positive benefit and those above get a negative effect.

This makes sense, as the models are an average of the code out there and some of us are above and below that average.

Sorry btw I do not want to offend anyone who feels they do garner a benefit from LLMs, just wanted to drop in this idea!

My experience was exactly the opposite.

Experienced developers know when the LLM goes off the rails, and are typically better at finding useful applications. Junior developers on the other hand, can let horrible solutions pass through unchecked.

Then again, LLMs are improving so quickly, that the most recent ones help juniors to learn and understand things better.

It’s also really good for me as a very senior engineer with serious ADHD. Sometimes I get very mentally blocked, and telling Claude Code to plan and implement a feature gives me a really valuable starting point and has a way of unblocking me. For me it’s easier to elaborate off of an existing idea or starting point and refactor than start a whole big thing from zero on my own.

i don't know if anybody else has experienced this, but one of my biggest time-sucks with cursor is that it doesn't have a way for me to steer it mid-process that i'm aware of.

it'll build something that fails a test, but i know how to fix the problem. i can't jump in a manually fix it or tell it what to do. i just have to watch it churn through the problem and eventually give up and throw away a 90% good solution that i knew how to fix.

That's my anecdotal experience as well! Junior devs struggle with a lot of things:

- syntax

- iteration over an idea

- breaking down the task and verifying each step

Working with a tool like Claude that gets them started quick and iterate the solution together with them helps them tremendously and educate them on best practices in the field.

Contrast that with a seasoned developer with a domain experience, good command of the programming language and knowledge of the best practices and a clear vision of how the things can be implemented. They hardly need any help on those steps where the junior struggled and where the LLMs shine, maybe some quick check on the API, but that's mostly it. That's consistent with the finding of the study https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o... that experienced developers' performance suffered when using an LLM.

What I used as a metaphor before to describe this phenomena is training wheels: kids learning how to ride a bike can get the basics with the help and safety of the wheels, but adults that already can ride a bike don't have any use for the training wheels, and can often find restricted by them.