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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

pretty much, yeah. I would point out that it does take time/effort to learn how to use the tooling!

as a small example, my partner had to do some work the other day on a pdf where there was quite a bit of existing accessibility stuff; the doc needed to be resized to uniform, have links added to the TOC, add a footer, etc.

sat with her for about an hour iterating on the problem in opus 4.5, having it write python to do the modifications. was like $21 in raw token costs. it did great! but it wasn’t as simple as saying “oh do xyz to this pdf”