Most of the comments so far are responding to the first few paragraphs of this article. On reading further, I thought this was actually an unusually balanced take on how to use LLMs in a software org.

I can't help but cringe at the "cost of code is now zero" meme that this article repeats because in my experience the biggest cost of code was always the activities around the code - planning, communicating, reviewing, validating. This author, despite repeating the meme, seems to agree. Their emphasis on writing PR descriptions and specs for humans rhymes with my experience and it sounds like a nicer way to work than chasing some dark factory fever dream.

I also thought the "Two Modes of Working" section was useful. People get wildly different results from coding agents depending on how they use them, but I've not seen a lot of actual guidance on when to do X vs Y.

Personally, I've been using what the author calls "sidekick mode" since last October - before the supposed "AI got good now" threshold - and agree it's a more useful default for an engineer than "delegate mode".

Writings code has been viewed as an expensive part of development for a while. That's why the coding interview script the industry has adopted requires you to to not write any code until you suffenciently planned the whole problem.