My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now (GLM-4.5 Air)

Did you understand the implementation or just that it produced a result?

I would hope an LLM could spit out a cobbled form of answer to a common interview question.

Today a colleague presented data changes and used an LLM to build a display app for the JSON for presentation. Why did they not just pipe the JSON into our already working app that displays this data?

People around me for the most part are using LLMs to enhance their presentations, not to actually implement anything useful. I have been watching my coworkers use it that way for months.

Another example? A different coworker wanted to build a document macro to perform bulk updates on courseware content. Swapping old words for new words. To build the macro they first wrote a rubrick to prompt an LLM correctly inside of a word doc.

That filled rubrik is then used to generate a program template for the macro. To define the requirements for the macro the coworker then used a slideshow slide to list bullet points of functionality, in this case to Find+Replace words in courseware slides/documents using a list of words from another text document. Due to the complexity of the system, I can’t believe my colleague saved any time. The presentation was interesting though and that is what they got compliments on.

However the solutions are absolutely useless for anyone else but the implementer.

I scanned the code and understood what it was doing, but I didn't spend much time on it once I'd seen that it worked.

If I'm writing code for production systems using LLMs I still review every single line - my personal rule is I need to be able to explain how it works to someone else before I'm willing to commit it.

I wrote a whole lot more about my approach to using LLMs to help write "real" code here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/11/using-llms-for-code/

Serious question: if you have to read every line of code in order to validate it in production, why not just write every line of code instead?

Because it's much, much faster to review a hundred lines of code than it is to write a hundred lines of code.

(I'm experienced at reading and reviewing code.)

Simon, don't you fear "atrophy" in your writing ability?