I'm not remotely cutting edge (just switched from Cursor to Codex CLI, have no fancy tooling infrastructure, am not even vaguely considering git worktrees as a means of working), but Opus 4.5 and 5.2 Codex are both so clearly more competent than previous models that I've started just telling them to do high-level things rather than trying to break things down and give them subtasks.

If people are really set in their ways, maybe they won't try anything beyond what old models can do, and won't notice a difference, but who's had time to get set in their ways with this stuff?

What's the difference between using llms now vs the first half of 2025 among the best users?

I have found it to be pretty bad at formatting tables

I get what you're saying, but I would say that this does not match my own experience. For me, prior to the agentic coding era, the problem was always that I had way more ideas for features, tools, or projects than I had the capacity to build when I had to confront the work of building everything by hand, also dealing with the inevitable difficulties in procrastination and getting started.

I am a very above-average engineer when it comes to speed at completing work well, whether that's typing speed or comprehension speed, and still these tools have felt like giving me a jetpack for my mind. I can get things done in weeks that would have taken me months before, and that opens up space to consider new areas that I wouldn't have even bothered exploring before because I would not have had the time to execute on them well.

The sibling comments (from remich and sanufar) match my experience.

1. I do love getting into the details of code, but I don't mind having an LLM handle boilerplate.

2. There isn't a binary between having an LLM generate all the code and writing it all myself.

3. I still do most of the design work because LLMs often make questionable design decisions.

4. Sometimes I simply want a program to solve a problem (outcome-focused) over a project to work on (craft-focused). Sometimes I need a small program in order to focus on the larger project, and being able to delegate that work has made it more enjoyable.

I think for me, the difference really comes down to how much ownership I want to take in regards to the project. If it’s something like a custom kernel that I’m building, the real fun is in reading through docs, learning about systems, and trying to craft the perfect abstractions; but if it’s wiring up a simple pipeline that sends me a text whenever my bus arrives, I’m happy to let an LLM crank that out for me.

I’ve realized that a lot of my coding is on this personal satisfaction vs utility matrix and llms let me focus a lot more energy onto high satisfaction projects

> deep / fast / craft-and-decomposition-loving vs black box / outcome-only

As a (self-reported) craft-and-decomposition lover, I wouldn't call the process "fast".

Certainly it's much faster than if I were trying to take the same approach without the same skills; and certainly I could slow it down with over-engineering. (And "deep" absolutely fits.) But the people I've known that I'd characterize as strongly "outcome-only", were certainly capable of sustaining some pretty high delta-LoC per day.

As a former tech lead and now staff engineer, I definitely agree with this. I read a blog post a couple of months ago that theorized that the people that would adopt these technologies the best were people in the exact roles that you describe. I think because we were already used to having to rely on other people to execute on our plans and ideas because they were simply too big to accomplish by ourselves. Now that we have agents to do these things, it's not really all that different - although it is a different management style working around their limitations.

It feels like we all signed up to be ICs, but now we’re middle managers and our reports are bots.

You’re possibly not entering into the flow state anymore.

Flow is effortless. and it is rejuvenating.

I believe:

While communication can be satisfying, it’s not as rejuvenating as resting in our own Being and simply allowing the action to unfold without mental contraction.

Flow states.

When the right level of challenge and capability align and you become intimate with the problem. The boundaries of me and the problem dissolve and creativity springs forth. Emerging satisfied. Nourished.

This is why I think LLMs will make us all a LOT smarter. Raw code made it so we stopped heavily thinking in between but now it's just 100% the most intense thought processes all day long.

In my world there are Hard Problems that need to be solved for bu$ine$$ rea$on$, no being a "force multiplier" required (whatever that really means).

> I don't think that anyone actually believes that writing code is only for junior developers.

That is, unquestionably, how it ought to be. However, the mainstream – regrettably – has devolved into a well-worn and intellectually stagnant trajectory, wherein senior developers are not merely encouraged but expected to abandon the coding altogether, ascending instead into roles such as engineering managers (no offence – good engineering managers are important, it is the quality that has been diluted across the board), platform overseers (a new term for stage gate keepers), or so-called solution architects (the ones who are imbued with compliance, governance and do not venture out past that).

In this model, neither role is expected – and in some lamentable cases, is explicitly forbidden[0] – to engage directly with code. The result is a sterile detachment from the very systems they are charged with overseeing.

Worse still, the industry actively incentivises ill-considered career leaps – for instance, elevating a developer with limited engineering depth into the position of a solution designer or architect. The outcome is as predictable as it is corrosive: individuals who can neither design nor architect.

The number of organisations in which expert-level coding proficiency remains the norm at senior or very senior levels has dwindled substantially over the past couple of decades or so – job ads explicitly call out the management experience, knowledge of vacuous or limited usefulness architectural frameworks (TOGAF and alike). There do remain rare islands in an ever-expanding ocean of managerial abstraction where architects who write code, not incessantly but when a need be, are still recognised as invaluable. Yet their presence is scarce.

The lamentable state of affairs has led to a piquant situation on the job market. In recent years, headhunters have started complaining about being unable to find an actually highly proficient, experienced, and, most importantly, technical architect. One's loss is another one's gain, or at least an opportunity, of course.

[0] Speaking from firsthand experience of observing a solution architect to have quit their job to run a bakery (yes) due to the head of architecture they were reporting to explicitly demanding the architect quit coding. The architect did quit, albeit in a different way.

If you really did that full time and never wrote code, you’d be a terrible reviewer.

Be careful what you wish for.

I'm not sure how I can prove it, but ~25 years ago building software without open source sucked. You had to build everything from scratch! It took months to get even the most basic things up and running.

I think open source is the single most important productivity boost to our industry that's ever existed. Automated testing is a close second.

Google, Facebook, many others would not have existed without open source to build on.

And those giants and others like them that were enabled by open source employed a TON of people, at competitive rates that greatly increased our salaries.

I think the reason for the varying claims and predictions is because developers have wildly different standards for what constitutes working code. For the developers with a lower threshold, AI is like crack to them because gen ai's output is similar to what they would produce, and it really is a 10x speedup. For others, especially those who have to fix and maintain that code, it's more like a 10x slowdown.

Hence why you have in the same thread, some developer who claims that Claude writes 99% of their code and another developer who finds it totally useless. And of course others who are somewhere in the middle.

Its all a hype train though. People still believe in the AI gonna bring utopia bullshit while the current infra is being built on debt. The only reason it still exists is that all these AI companies believe in some kind of revenue outside of subscriptions. So its all about:

Owning the infrastructure and enshittify (ads) once enough products are based on AI.

Its the same chokehold Amazon has on its Vendors.

.env files are a thing in tons of codebases

Maybe I was being imprecise, but I’m not sure what you mean by “not how LLMs work” - discovering patterns of how humans write is exactly the signal they are trained against. Either explicitly curated like SFT or coaxed out during RLHF, no?

It could even have been picked up in pretraining and then rewarded during rlhf when the output domain was being refined; I haven’t used enough LLMs before post training to know what step it usually becomes noticeable.

Until you realize you're just begging and coaxing a human to better beg and coax a machine to output working code - when you could just beg and coax the machine yourself.

"Yup I now have enough money to survive without working" Your opinion is borderline irrelevant then.

you work on somebody's dime, its no longer your choice

you dont get paid to have fun but to produce as a laborer

a job isn't supposed to be fun its nice when it is but it shouldn't be what drives decisions