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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

They can be useful for developers who are experts and know what the output should be. They are a hindrance to junior developers and you shouldn't use them if you are learning or you don't know how to evaluate the output.

That's still a big open question for me I've coached a lot of early stage developers and one of the key things I've found is that the first six months are agonizingly frustrating - you miss a semicolon and your code doesn't compile and it takes an hour to figure out why