This is what's so funny about this. In some alternative universe I hope that LLMs never get any better. Because they force so much of good things.

They are the single closest thing we've ever had to objective evaluation on if an engineering practice is better or worse. Simply because just about every single engineering practice that I see that makes coding agents work well also makes humans work well.

And so many of these circular debates and other best practices (TDD, static typing, keeping todo lists, working in smaller pieces, testing independently before testing together, clearly defined codebase practices, ...) have all been settled in my mind.

The most controversial take, and the one I dislike but may reluctantly have to agree with is "Is it better for a business to use a popular language less suited for the task than a less popular language more suited for it." While obviously it's a sliding scale, coding agents clearly weight in on one side of this debate... as little as I like seeing it.

While a lot of these ideas are touted as "good for the org," in the case of LLMs, it's more like guard rails against something that can't reason things out. That doesn't mean that the practices are bad, but I would much prefer that these LLMs (or some better mechanism) everyone is being pushed to use could actual reason, remember, and improve, so that this sort of guarding wouldn't be a requirement for correct code.

Well put, I like this perspective.