Up until the last couple of months, I have treated LLMs as a supercharged stackoverflow. I would ask it questions on how to do something in a general sense, and then adapt the answer to my use case.

Now, my entire programming flow does not even include an editor. The tools I use are: pi.dev to write and implement openspec specifications, herdr to manage many pi instances, and ollama to run qwen 3.8 27b on my single 7900 XTX.

Writing good specifications is the key detail here. I will often iterate on a spec for hours until I am happy with it all of the details. Once I am happy with the spec, I can be quite confident that when I tell pi to apply the spec, the changes that I want will be done, and done how I want them, when I come back to check when it reports itself as done.

The landscale is fundamentally different from what it was. Feel free to ignore it, but you can absolutely generate high quality code if you know what you're doing.

N=1 and might be a raw skill issue on my end.

But I all but stopped writing code 13 months ago. At the beginning the code was often bad.

In the last 6 months alone I had received more praise from my customers for excellent work than ever before.

At least what I have seen in Ruby and Typescript, they are excellent at doing what you asked for. But if what you asked for is stupid they will happily make it happen.

They don’t make normal mistakes like typos and they aren’t lazy so things like tests and checking error cases is usually done.

I find it unnecessary for most non-critical code, such as client applications.

I doubt that any supposed future extra effort for the AI to add new code is remotely comparable to the upfront effort of you reviewing the code manually.

I know that this is the case today for native mobile apps, and I speak from hundreds of hours of experience over the last four months on such a project where I stopped reviewing the code.

We are already here today, and this balance is only going to further shift to the point where it is obvious that the hands-on approach is no longer competitive.

LLMs have been good at knowing what's in the manual from v1.0. Super good at that. Pretty good translators. Pretty good at doing things that have been done a million times before, like your CRUD app. Super mediocre at everything else.

LLMs as things that know what's in the manual are AAA+. Extremely helpful. Very good at making a rough draft of something filled with a lot of stupid mistakes and no new abstractions. That's what your transparent window thing is. Something that you could never ship, is probably too big and doing senseless things for no intelligible reason, and definitely has bizarre bugs.

We can't judge code quality without having the code.