Yeah right. A LLM in the hands of a junior engineer produces a lot of code that looks like they are written by juniors. A LLM in the hands of a senior engineer produces code that looks like they are written by seniors. The difference is the quality of the prompt, as well as the human judgement to reject the LLM code and follow-up prompts to tell the LLM what to write instead.

Prompting is just step 1. Creating and reviewing a plan is step 2. Step 0 was iterating and getting the right skills in place. Step 3 is a command/skill that decomposes the problem into small implementation steps each with a dependency and how to verify/test the implementation step. Step 4 is execute the implementation plan using sub agents and ensuring validation/testing passes. Step 5 is a code review using codex (since I use claude for implementation).

I kind of agree. But I'd adjust that to say that in both cases you get good looking code. In the hands of a junior you get crappy architecture decisions and complete failure to manage complexity which results in the inevitable reddit "they degraded the model" post. In the hands of seniors you get well managed complexity, targeted features, scalable high performance architecture, and good base technology choices.

Lol what. The difference is that the senior... is a senior. Ask yourself what characteristics comprises a senior vs junior...

You're glossing over so much stuff. Moreover, how does the Junior grow and become the senior with those characteristics, if their starting point is LLMs?