[wkirby]

The reason I am a software engineer — why it keeps me coming back every week — is the satisfying click when something I didn’t understand becomes obvious. I’ve talked to a lot of engineers over the last 15 years of doing this, and for most of them, they possess some version of the same compulsion. What makes good engineers tick is, imo, a tenacity and knack for solving puzzles. LLMs are useful when they let you get to the meat of the problem faster, but as the article says, they’re a hindrance when they are relied on to solve the problem. Knowing the difference is hard, a heuristic I work on with my team is “use an LLM if you already know the code you want to write.” If you don’t already know the right answer you won’t know if the LLM is giving you garbage.