[radlad]

> I use LLMs for exploration and for review, but I write the code myself. I find it hard to believe why so many engineers try to avoid it. It’s not consuming much of my time. And it’s actually the most enjoyable part.

At my workplace, there is more work to be done than there is engineers, and approximately 2 engineers per service. I can spin off multiple Claude Code instances on unrelated work, steering them occasionally, and then finally reviewing the output. After I have reviewed it, I post it for team review.

You're absolutely right that my depth of familiarity is lesser with this code, but we are absolutely shipping more as a result of increased parallelization.

The bottleneck now is typically reviews - both pre-push and team reviews.

[M0r13n]

This seems to assume more code shipped equals more work done. I am still not convinced that this is necessarily the case. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is not. You mentioned that reviews are now the bottleneck and that your familiarity with the code has decreased. That tradeoff might eat into the parallelization gains over time.

[radlad]

Definitely not - the biggest risk with this increased speed is going full-bore in the wrong direction. A product mindset (and a critical eye to architecture) matters more now than ever.

[leptons]

Most people hyping their AI use mention the short-term gains without taking into account how it affects overall long-term success. We are creatures of convenience.

[radlad]

Considering most teams have only switched to heavy AI use in the past few months, the verdict is still out on this.

That said, I've had lots of success using AI to learn, refactor and clean up codebases.

I notice another trend were a lot of AI naysayers haven't really spent a ton of time getting intimately familiar with AI.

[leptons]

>I notice another trend were a lot of AI naysayers haven't really spent a ton of time getting intimately familiar with AI.

I don't think that's really true, it's more your feels than anything. I've noticed this thing where everyone that's using AI think nobody else is using AI, or at least not the cool way they are doing it. It's typically nonsense.

I've been using AI for quite a while, personally and professionally, and I can already see the clusterfuck it's causing. I still don't let it work on my important personal projects, but for simple tools and websites, sure. At work we're told to use AI exclusively to code, and it's already causing problems - the AI just endlessly applies bandaid after bandaid and it's turned the code to spaghetti. Nobody even reads the code, the people above just tell us to approve it and ship it. I'm looking for a new job because I already know this isn't going to produce the long-term success they are expecting. All it is doing is making it more expensive to write software, without the knowledge of how the code works, and if you can't already understand how that looks in the future, well... I don't know what to tell you.

[radlad]

I'm sorry to hear that's how it's going at your work.