[boshalfoshal]

I think the super played out twitter adage has some merit to it: "it makes 10x devs 100x devs."

Those who already have a high level idea of what to do and roughly how to execute it benefit the most from LLMs at the moment. This is very good for purely "technical" devs in greenfield environments. Less useful for super large interconnected codebases, but tools are getting there.

It will not, however, make a bad dev a good one magically. A bad software product is not usually bottlenecked by the software its running on, its bottlenecked by user experience and pmf. That still requires some skilled human input, but that could also change soon. Some people have better product intuition than others but couldn't execute on complex code, so LLMs do help here to an extent.

As of 2025, I think you still need to be a pretty decent dev even with LLM assistance.

[pockmarked19]

Not high level, you need to know exactly how it’s done. If you don’t at the start, then you will by the time you arrive at the working commit.

The exception (in that you must learn something) is in design, though. If you ask AI to add something to your API, and do it repeatedly, you will end up with a very poorly designed API, with separate endpoints for updating separate fields in the same record, etc, which will happily work fine.

Unless you knew what to do from the start, you’re going to make a lot of tech debt.