surprised at the responses to this post. While I thought the title was dumb, the underlying thesis is not the ragebait I was expecting, and I actually agree with the author.

LLM's work best when they can call a tool and observe the success/failure of a change. If you're HITL then you're the tool, but the result is the same. only slower.

I'm working on a 2D game (pixi.js) with claudecode, and after I moved some logic into a webworker the LLM created a headless simulation exercise of it and would run this to test performance changes against (or in exploration of an issue), which I was surprised by.

I also created some robust graphs & metrics which were easy to screenshot and upload to claude. this was a HITL but it gave claude a lot more insight into what's actually happening instead of guessing when the browser plays the game and has FPS drop.

LLM's do best when they can see what their code is doing. If you can't remove yourself from that cycle of testing you should at least optimize it so you can give rich errors.