A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code

I guess we're just going to be in the age of this conversation topic until everyone gets tired of talking about it.

Every one of these discussions boils down to the following:

- LLMs are not good at writing code on their own unless it's extremely simple or boilerplate

- LLMs can be good at helping you debug existing code

- LLMs can be good at brainstorming solutions to new problems

- The code that is written by LLMs always needs to be heavily monitored for correctness, style, and design, and then typically edited down, often to at least half its original size

- LLMs utility is high enough that it is now going to be a standard tool in the toolbox of every software engineer, but it is definitely not replacing anyone at current capability.

- New software engineers are going to suffer the most because they know how to edit the responses the least, but this was true when they wrote their own code with stack overflow.

- At senior level, sometimes using LLMs is going to save you a ton of time and sometimes it's going to waste your time. Net-net, it's probably positive, but there are definitely some horrible days where you spend too long going back and forth, when you should have just tried to solve the problem yourself.

> but this was true when they wrote their own code with stack overflow.

Searching for solutions and integrating examples found requires effort that develops into a skill. You would rarely get solutions that would just fit into the codebase from SO. If I give a task to you and you produce a correct solution on the initial review I now know I can trust you to deal with this kind of problem in the future. Especially after a few reviews.

If you just vibed through the problem the LLM might have given you the correct solution - but there is no guarantee that it will do it again in the future. Just because you spent less effort on search/official docs/integration into the codebase you learned less about everything surrounding it.

So using LLMs as a junior you are just breaking my trust, and we both know you are not a competent reviewer of LLM code - why am I even dealing with you when I'll get LLM outputs faster myself ? This was my experience so far.

Like with any kind of learning, without a feedback loop (as tight as possible IMHO), it's not gonna happen. And there is always some kind of feedback loop.

Ultra short cycle: Pairing with a senior, solid manual and automated testing during development.

Reasonably short cycle: Code review by a senior within hours and for small subsets of the work ideally, QA testing by a seperate person within hours.

Borderline too long cycle: Code review of larger chunks of code by a senior with days of delay, QA testing by a seperate person days or weeks after implementation.

Terminally long feedback cycle: Critical bug in production, data loss, negative career consequences.

I'm confident that juniors will still learn, eventually. Seniors can help them learn a whole lot faster though, if both sides want that, and if the organisation lets them. And yeah, that's even more the case than in the pre LLM world.