They make some engineers 10x more productive and some engineers 10x less productive. LLMs give you all the rope you want to hang yourself.
Some engs I work with have their strengths, but using an LLM just totally ruins them. I watched one miss a deadline by a month - letting Claude take them down OOM rabbit holes for a simple python ETL script.
When I did finally stop and try to help what I saw was incredible. Claude churned out all of this OOM/garbage collection with prediction nonsense - totally gaslighting this engineer. They didn’t even stop to question and have the thought Python did its own GC - why are they writing code to do it? Whats wrong with my logic? Claude certainly didn’t bring it up…
This individual would have performed better without an LLM - just writing from scratch on their own being forced to think step by step and understand the implementation and the tools they were using. This has been great for
Years for this eng.
Flip side is I’ve seen good engineers do incredible things. I’m worried this widens the skill gap.
I hope these individuals, like
The Eng I mentioned with the script, can figure out a productive way to leverage LLMs. It’s definitely a new skill to use agentic coding tools.
Some engs I work with have their strengths, but using an LLM just totally ruins them. I watched one miss a deadline by a month - letting Claude take them down OOM rabbit holes for a simple python ETL script.
When I did finally stop and try to help what I saw was incredible. Claude churned out all of this OOM/garbage collection with prediction nonsense - totally gaslighting this engineer. They didn’t even stop to question and have the thought Python did its own GC - why are they writing code to do it? Whats wrong with my logic? Claude certainly didn’t bring it up…
This individual would have performed better without an LLM - just writing from scratch on their own being forced to think step by step and understand the implementation and the tools they were using. This has been great for Years for this eng.
Flip side is I’ve seen good engineers do incredible things. I’m worried this widens the skill gap.
I hope these individuals, like The Eng I mentioned with the script, can figure out a productive way to leverage LLMs. It’s definitely a new skill to use agentic coding tools.