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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

it's also true I wouldn't accept code from someone who couldn't write that code without an AI assistant and who doesn't know how it works, especially if it's a hit-and-run PR that they won't have to maintain

Same here - my hard rule is that if you can't explain how the code works that code shouldn't end up in a commit to anything other than a toy project

I want to briefly name that you, Simon, and @unstable-idiot.bsky.social are saying two different things that I think have two very different implications. “have to be able to write the code without an LLM” and “can explain how the code works” are, in fact, pretty different things.

Good point - yeah, I do disagree slightly there I'm OK with code you couldn't have written without AI assistance provided you completely understand it and can explain how it DOES work

“Code you couldn’t have written without assistance” is - in my opinion - essentially equivalent to “code you don’t understand”

I thought that at first but I've come to a different conclusion now A huge factor in building something is balancing the time taken to build it with the value of the project - I've rejected so many potential projects in the past because I can't justify the time needed to figure out different parts

AI assistance entirely changes that equation - if I can reduce a problem to something that a coding agent can go and crunch away at while I'm doing other things I can say "yes" to all manner of learning exercises that I previously didn't have enough time to take on

That’s fair. I guess it’s about the reason you “couldn’t” write the code It’s also fine to use code you don’t fully understand for some things!