bigstrat2003 11 hours ago

Yep, the goalposts just keep shifting. In reality: they still don't work well, unless you're content with producing low quality work.

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bathtub365 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This is the opposite of my experience since about February of this year.

	▲	gymbeaux 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The quality of the output is so variable. It depends on the model, “effort level”, prompting, probably even the programming language/app functionality, and libraries involved. For example, I find LLMs are best at making simple web apps. These web apps, while simple, would still take a senior engineer perhaps a week or two to create, but LLMs can spit them out inside of an hour. Conversely, LLMs struggle with things like Docker or local model stuff. Parallelization of code is a mixed bag. In these areas I think it often would have been faster for me to write the thing by hand.

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throwaway7783 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"unless you're content with producing low quality work." - With the right guiding hand, it is a productivity multiplier without compromising quality. As a fully autonomous developer, it is a disaster.

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close04 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

How are junior devs becoming qualified “guiding hands” these days? If the expert with LLM assistance is multiplied, what’s a company’s incentive to pay for a junior, and how would they train to get good in these conditions?

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Forgeties79 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> With the right guiding hand, it is a productivity multiplier without compromising quality

This just reads like another variation of “it’s the user not the tool,” which is just endless runway for always blaming people and never acknowledging the limitations of LLM’s.

I’d be curious to hear how the recipients of your work enabled by the “productivity multiplier” feel about the quality.

	▲	inglor_cz an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		You can't play an entire orchestra's sheet music on a single guitar either, but your playing ability still matters a lot. I would say that as of July 2026, with the right scaffolding, you can get reasonably good output out of a LLM, or better a combination of LLMs. For example, it pays off to prepare an implementation plan with one LLM and then let another LLM check it for flaws, then again. After several iterations like this, you will have a plan better than whatever you could come up with yourself. It often is the user and not the tool. LLMs are complicated, have nontrivial failure modes, and the user needs to steer them carefully. They might be the most complicated tools on the planet right now. Anecdotally, the recipients of my work have become visibly more happy in the last months. LLMs are great at diagnosing subtle problems which tend to appear at Friday night only, and this is the sort of problem that bugs actual people the most.
	▲	11 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[deleted]

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ffsm8 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

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simonw 11 hours ago | parent [-]

I produce code that is significantly higher quality with the assistance of coding agents, because I no longer succumb to the temptation to cut corners due to lack of time.

One example: everything I do is properly tested and documented now, even the most trivial of changes. Previously I would have weighed those tradeoffs and sometimes decided not to bother with the tests because they weren't worth the time.

	▲	janussunaj 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> because I no longer succumb to the temptation to cut corners due to lack of time No offense, but that says much more about the way you approach programming than about the quality of LLM outputs. In my experience, LLMs are the ultimate corner-cutting tool. With LLMs, I now succumb to the temptation to cut corners, build something I haven't properly researched and don't fully understand, prioritize shipping quantity over quality. Without LLMs, I have to understand the domain and the tools and ultimately my full solution (with all its warts and limitations). When I really care about the project and consider it "my baby", LLMs are out of the picture.

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oceanplexian 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What kind of work are you doing and what do you consider to be quality or not?

Of course don’t let me assume, maybe you have a higher quality disproof for the Jacobian conjecture you could share with the class.