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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

As someone in a leadership role in our software engineering organization, this is actually the sticking point for me: there are often perceived or actual (in our case mostly just perceived) incentives to SHIP FAST in ways that very directly undermine the commitment to understanding generated code.

In my experience, how well the tools work is also (a) very context-dependent, not only in the sense of “how much of this is in the distribution?” but also “what kind of work am I doing?” and (b) depends on how comfortable you are with the totally unsurprising tendency to regress toward the mean.

There are ways to deal with both of those, but they aren’t always worth the cost, and *one* part of the push-back is because there are folks saying, “This is a useful thing that you should have in your toolbelt”… and then there are many, *many* folks saying “all software MUST be written by AI!”

The latter will leave a very bad taste in any thoughtful software developer’s mouth, and in particular when the push does *not* recognize where these tools have cliffs and sharp edges or even just take (often *much*) more time than just doing it yourself manually would. I find these all the time!

Unfortunately… «points at Shopify and other such places with nasty mandates» Part of the trick is that if you’re in-distribution you get one experience, and if you’re out-of-distribution, you get a wildly different one. It’s really hard to get some folks (not you!) on the booster side to get that.

My go-to example for my own work: “Build me an ESLint rule with fixer” works extraordinarily well. “Fix this issue that is down to a very arcane bit of type theory as applied in this narrow corner of TS” consistently makes what I can only describe as the *worst possible* decisions. 😂