I seriously thought this was a joke the first time I read it. Are people really able to work like this, understanding nothing and just poking the machine until it does your job for you?

I've been more or less doing this on a personal project. It's fun and interesting. No matter what techniques I use though, the code produced by the LLM is rarely what I would consider good engineering. It's frequently good code in isolation though.

Where it does help is when I'm too tired to start figuring out a problem. It's easier to prompt in natural language and get the agent to ask lots of clarifying questions than it is to get stuck in code in the evening after I have worked all day and have lots of other things in my mind.

Every time I actually crack the code open though, it's almost impossible to figure out certain parts of it. Abstractions are all over the place and leakages are the norm, there's no theory of the system because the LLM doesn't theorise, and as soon as the first anti-pattern slips through, subsequent agents pick up on it and amplify it into a set pattern.

I worked for most of a decade on an a high profile deep learning project and I sat next to people who trained models used for very complicated and interesting things involved in medicine. I built tons of application code around the models, but I never trained any models myself. I did plenty of old school segmentation stuff earlier in my career, and it just really wasn't my jam - I was much more into the visualization side of things.

Two nights ago I sat down and decided to build a little project that's been on my list for ages: reading images of the 7-segment LED displays on the front of my washer and dryer and turning them into numeric minutes-remaining values I can use in Home Assistant. I have a 10yo raspi with camera pointed at them, and the images are pretty blurry; it's been hooked up to a little web frontend which pulls out the two displays and shows them in a Home Assistant iFrame.

I figured if I can ask a model to do the annoying part of figuring out all the frameworks and that sort of crap. So I asked my agent (I'm using some free agents that are pretty decent - Nemotron Ultra from OpenRouter and Big Pickle from OpenCode Zen) to build me an OpenCV classifier to try to read the digits. I asked it to write me a labeling UI, ran some loads of laundry and captured a couple hundred images and labeled them manually. Then I had it try to build a template-based classifier using some basic techniques - I didn't really give it much guidance other than general parameters, and it put together something that looked pretty sophisticated, and it claimed 100% accuracy, which seemed hard to believe. Turns out I forgot to tell it to hold out some sample images...

After some iteration (which felt very similar to conversations I overheard at my desk! I might have actually learned some stuff by osmosis) I gave up on the old-school approach when it was only about 70% accurate, and asked it to train me a CNN model. First one was too simple (worse than the original approach), but the second one is very good. With my already labeled dataset and the previous work that had been done on the classifier, the free model was able to build me my custom model, and deployment scripts, in about half an hour.

I didn't look at any of the code, but I had it build me a bunch of various visualization and tuning UIs. I was basically acting as a PM/TPM/QA engineer, and what I was able to do in a couple evenings is stuff that entire teams used to spend weeks on.