You have decades of expert knowledge, which you can use to drive the LLMs in an expert way. Thats where the value is. The industry or narrative might not have figured that out yet, but its inevitable.
Garbage in, garbage out still very much applies in this new world.
And just to add, the key metric to good software hasn't changed, and won't change. It's not even about writing the code, the language, the style, the clever tricks. What really matters is how well does the code performs 1 month after it goes live, 6 months, 5 years. This game is a long game. And not just how well does the computer run the code, but how well can the humans work with the code.
Use your experience to generate the value from the LLMs, cuase they aren't going to generate anything by themselves.
After 40 years in this industry—I started at 10 and hit 50 this year—I’ve developed a low tolerance for architectural decay.
Last night, I used Claude to spin up a website editor. My baseline for this project was a minimal JavaScript UI I’ve been running that clocks in at a lean 2.7KB (https://ponder.joeldare.com). It’s fast, it’s stable, and I understand every line. But for this session, I opted for Node and neglected to include my usual "zero-framework" constraint in the prompt.
The result is a functional, working piece of software that is also a total disaster. It’s a 48KB bundle with 5 direct dependencies—which exploded into 89 total dependencies. In a world where we prioritize "velocity" over maintenance, this is the status quo. For me, it’s unacceptable.
If a simple editor requires 89 third-party packages to exist, it won't survive the 5-year test. I'm going back to basics.
I'll try again but we NEED to expertly drive these tools, at least right now.
What's missing is another LLM dialog between you and Claude. One that figures out your priorities, your non-functional requirements, and instructs Claude appropriately.
We'll get there.
There are already spec frameworks that do precisely this. I've been using BMAD for planning and speccing out something fairly elaborate, and it's been a blast.