LLM code is higher quality than any codes I have seen in my 20 years in F500. So yeah you need to "guide" it, and ensure that it will not bypass all the security guidance for ex...But at least you are in control, although the cognitive load is much higher as well than just "blind trust of what is delivered".

But I can see the carnage with offshoring+LLM, or "most employees", including so call software engineer + LLM.

  > LLM code is higher quality than any codes I have seen in my 20 years in F500.

For me, I'll do the engineering work of designing a system, then give it the specific designs and constraints. I'll let it plan out the implementation, then I give it notes if it varies in ways I didn't expect. Once we agree on a solution, that's when I set it free. The frontier models usually do a pretty good job with this work flow at this point.

Yeah that describes most legacy codebases I've worked on XD

Heh, people like to have someone else to blame.

If you a) know what you are doing and b) know what an llm is capable of doing, c) can manage multiple llm agents at a time, you can be unbelievably productive. Those skills I think are less common than people assume.

You need to be technical, have good communication skills, have big picture vision, be organized, etc. If you are a staff level engineer, you basically feel like you don’t need anyone else.

OTOH i have been seeing even fairly technical engineering managers struggle because they can’t get the LLMs to execute because they don’t know how to ask it what to do.

Really? Because this perfectly explains why it will never replace them: it needs an exact language listing everything required to function as you expect it.

You need code to get it to generate proper code.