Post

At the risk of starting the flame war to end all flame wars... Modern LLMs (GPT-5.1, Claude 4.5, Gemini 3) produce excellent code and can be a significant productivity boost to software engineers who take the time to learn how to effectively apply them - especially if used with coding agent tools

it's also true I wouldn't accept code from someone who couldn't write that code without an AI assistant and who doesn't know how it works, especially if it's a hit-and-run PR that they won't have to maintain

Same here - my hard rule is that if you can't explain how the code works that code shouldn't end up in a commit to anything other than a toy project

As someone in a leadership role in our software engineering organization, this is actually the sticking point for me: there are often perceived or actual (in our case mostly just perceived) incentives to SHIP FAST in ways that very directly undermine the commitment to understanding generated code.

There are ways to deal with both of those, but they aren’t always worth the cost, and *one* part of the push-back is because there are folks saying, “This is a useful thing that you should have in your toolbelt”… and then there are many, *many* folks saying “all software MUST be written by AI!”

The latter will leave a very bad taste in any thoughtful software developer’s mouth, and in particular when the push does *not* recognize where these tools have cliffs and sharp edges or even just take (often *much*) more time than just doing it yourself manually would. I find these all the time!

The latter definitely SHOULD leave a bad taste in the mouth! I would hope that the people pushing that aren't themselves experienced software developers

I find those cliffs and failure modes and “lol, I can do this *way* faster myself” all the time—and, I should add, as someone who does get value out of them in quite a few places. Some of that is the kind of work I do. A lot of it is quite far “out of distribution”… which is what makes the job fun!