As another commenter pointed out, I feel that the biggest change that occurred in the last 6 or so months is that these tools are removing the human "hurdle" in order to complete a task at all costs. The best way to complete the task is to no longer ask for input, clarify unclear things or use existing solutions but code the whole thing yourself from start to finish.

I have had the misfortune of working with such people who are now encapsulated in Opus 5/Fable/Astra which means that you WILL get a solution, but it won't generally be maintainable or useful. Multiple times have I found myself stopping Fable or Opus or even Sol from building their own JSON validator in Python or god knows what else, because at the end of the day, the reward is to complete the task.

It's also one of the reasons why I'm finding older models more useful for the type of work I actually do and why I've been favoring something like Deepseek Flash. Just started using Flash 4.1, so not sure if it exhibits the same maniacal approach to tasks as the Western counterparts. (I only briefly tried GLM 5.2/5.3 and for nothing major, so I couldn't comment on those).

For context, 80% of my professional work relies on adding functionality to an existing code-base that is very difficult to work with, has a ton of business logic scattered across and was built in a go-go-go fashion many years ago. Since then people kept pilling "features" on top with no testing strategy in mind apart from the business manually testing it. Letting something like an LLM loose on the code-base would introduce soooo much risk that it's just untenable so the only way to work is to really isolate changes and then try to build out small reusable components. Even so I find Opus go off on a tangent "Hey, let's not bring in Markdig, I'll build my own Markdown rendering engine, give me 7 hours...".

I have written on the subject of LLMs previously on my personal page, I find them completely unnecessary and a trove of theft and value extraction through theft, but I understand that they can provide benefits when used judiciously. However, despite all the hype in the last few months, these latest models feel and behave off.

If I hold the answers to a test, you might score more in a test if you break my arms to get the answers out of me, but that doesn't make you smarter.

I thought this was going in a different direction along some of the thoughts I had around LLMs for programming tasks specifically. While this talks about understanding and how to ensure you're keeping up with what is changing, I feel that this is maybe more aligned with how a PM/PO should understand the work being done and not necessarily how an engineer should.

I took a note a few months ago and my point was I think more engineering specific, although it might be my own lacking abilities/skills that caused this realization. "Your capacity to learn/recall and map information is the new bottleneck. LLMs can act as learning amplifiers but correctness isn't as important for their output as critical thinking on the side of the consumer - YOU."

My point is that, I think if an LLM outputs 50,000 lines of code, your ability to go through what has changed, how it has changed and where the changes have occurred is the bottleneck. I see the approaches here, sure, "summarize the changes" or "draw me a picture" or the more recently observed "build me a city building simulator to understand this", but I feel that misses the point from an engineering perspective. The difference in understanding the weeds such as DB transactional boundaries or tenant isolation (which I believe was a topic in a recent data leak), those aren't summarized that easily in drawings or if they are, if you are working at this granularity, then your 50,000 line PR will yield 50,000 pages of crayon drawings you now have to understand.

I guess, my point is that understanding is the bottleneck, but low level understanding and the ability to read/map/connect is even more so. Any developer with some experience will agree that if changes are trivial you can scan and pick up mistakes or flaws easily. So most SOTA models won't necessarily even make these. So what you're reviewing now is going to be one level higher or more in terms of difficulty, mapping multiple components or touching multiple surfaces. Your ability to make the links, reason about them and attempt to find flaws or logic issues is the bottleneck. In the time it takes you to understand, another 50,000 line PR is up.

I'm not sure how we're going to be solving this. I don't know if in the current state it is a solvable issue, maybe another 6 months? Maybe another 6 years? Maybe this is fine and we will settle in a sort of place where your mediocre engineer will be responsible for tens of reviews a day signing off on method/functions/classes/interfaces being added, get paid 50k a year and doing the same non-thinking work day in day out while signing their name to the quality of the code being shipped while a senior/lead will be busy reviewing multiple of these. Think of the way an assembly line functions.

P.S. I hate to see this annoying tendency of transforming knowledge work into assembly line work. We keep trying to "fix" this without understanding what knowledge itself is. Maybe this technology will indeed yield software assembly lines, I don't wish to eat my words, but I'm still struggling to see how we will handle the nitty gritty of software work. Maybe the same way we handle building airplanes - as long as only a couple crash a year, we're sort of fine.

I have been working on a static site generator. I've used Hugo and Jekyll before but everytime there is something you have to learn or get used to and they never map 1 to 1 to the flat structure of a simple blog for example.

It's a few classes of C# right now that parses a folder and auto generates the navigation, links, titles and summary off of the folder/file structure for the 1st level and then subsequent depth is mapped to individual items in the list view not on the nav bar (although I did that too, it looked weird with higher depth). So if you have a folder with 3 files and 2 additional folder you get 5 links in the nav bar, 3 content pages and 2 list pages. No other setup is needed. No llm written code, but I used deepseek v4 flash to ask various questions and get samples of some things.

I forgot just how much depth there is to exploring a simple problem. Loving it!