> Did you also notice the evolution of average developers over time? I mean, if you take code from a developer ten years ago and compare it with their output now, you can see improvement.

This makes little sense to me. Yes, individual developers gets better. I've seen little to no evidence that the average developer has gotten better.

> However, LLMs might reduce that effort to zero — we just don't know how developers will look after ten years of using LLMs now.

It might reduce that effort to zero from the same people who have always invested the bare minimum of effort to hold down a job. Most of them don't advance today either, and most of them will deliver vastly better results if they lean heavily on LLMs. On the high end, what I see experienced developers do with LLMs involves a whole lot of learning, and will continue to involve a whole lot of learning for many years, just like with any other tool.

> if you take code from a developer ten years ago and compare it with their output now, you can see improvement.

really? it depends on the type of development, but ten years ago the coder profession had already long gone mainstream and massified, with a lot of people just attracted by a convenient career rather than vocation. mediocrity was already the baseline ("agile" mentality to at the very least cope with that mediocrity and turnover churn was already at its peak) and on the other extreme coder narcissism was already en vogue.

the tools, resources, environments have indoubtedly improved a lot, though at the cost of overhead, overcomplexity. higher abstraction levels help but promote detachment from the fundamentals.

so specific areas and high end teams have probably improved, but i'd say average code quality has actually diminished, and keeps doing so. if it weren't for qa, monitoring, auditing and mitigation processes it would by now be catastrophic. cue in agents and vibe coding ...

as an old school coder that nowadays only codes for fun i see llm tools as an incredibly interesting and game changing tool for the profane, but that a professional coder might cede control to an agent (as opposed to use it for prospection or menial work) makes me already cringe, and i'm unable to wrap my head around vibe coding.

How about a human coworker who screws up 1% of the time? Doesn’t sound so bad in that light. It’s the nature of being human.

Good code review is the solution but if it’s faster to do it yourself, that’s fine too.

It depends on the harness and/or inference engine whether they keep the reasoning of past messages.

Not to get all philosophical but maybe justification is post-hoc even for humans.

I mostly find it useful for learning myself or for questioning a strange result. It usually works well for either of those. As you said, I'm probably not getting it's actual reasoning from any reasoning tokens but never thought that was happening anyway. It's just a way of interrogating the current situation in the current context.

It providing a different result is exactly because it's now looking at the existing solution and generating from there.

I think I like "blindly trust" better because vibe coders literally aren't looking.