> but it's not really an acceptable workflow for serious development.

At what cost does do you see this as acceptable? For example, how many hours of saved human development is worth one hour of salary for LLM tokens, funded by the developer? And then, what's acceptable if it's funded by the employer?

I guess there are two main concerns I have with it.

One is technical - that I don't believe when you are grinding huge amounts of code out with little to no supervision that you can claim to be executing the appropriate amount of engineering oversight on what it is doing. Just like if a junior dev showed up and entirely re-engineered an application over the weekend and presented it back to me I would probably reject it wholesale. My gut feeling is this is creating huge problems longer term with what is coming out of it.

The other is I'm concerned that a vast amount of the "cost" is externalised currently. Whatever you are paying for tokens quite likely bears no resemblance to the real cost. Either because the provider is subsidising it, or the environment is. I'm not at all against using LLMs to save work at a reasonable scale. But if it comes back to a single person increasing their productivity by grinding stupendous amounts of non-productive LLM output that is thrown away (you don't care if it sits there all day going around in circles if it eventually finds the right solution) - I think there's a moral responsibility to use the resources better.