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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

I still haven't worked out how to get LLMs to avoid adding increasingly more complexity to projects. The projects I tend to want them to work on are like multi threaded C++ projects, so maybe I should just stick to getting them to write little python tools to make my life simpler.

I don't have any relevant expertise with multi-threaded C++, I would be surprised to hear they're much less effective at that The most important trick I know is making sure they have a test suite they can run - most of my Claude Code sessions start with me saying "first run the tests like this:"

I find it perfectly believable that they're much less suited at that. When you do multi-threading and concurrency, you're basically trying to have your programs "encode proofs" (that there will be no race-conditions, etc). And LLMs are notoriously bad at maths