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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

I still haven't worked out how to get LLMs to avoid adding increasingly more complexity to projects. The projects I tend to want them to work on are like multi threaded C++ projects, so maybe I should just stick to getting them to write little python tools to make my life simpler.

I don't have any relevant expertise with multi-threaded C++, I would be surprised to hear they're much less effective at that The most important trick I know is making sure they have a test suite they can run - most of my Claude Code sessions start with me saying "first run the tests like this:"

I asked Google (no quotes): "how good is ai at writing c++ multithread code". Google's reply included limitations like this: "Multithreaded programming [involves]... issues like data races, deadlocks, and race conditions. AI models may struggle to identify and prevent these subtle bugs..."

Google's AI overviews are still the worst widely available AI models! I just checked and it's STILL saying Encanto 2 is a real movie, that bug is nearly a year old now simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/29/...

Yes why is that? I use LLMs all day, for everything, but those AI summaries on Google search are verifiably absolute pants