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.

FWIW, I think this summary is pretty in line with most "anti-LLM" crowd. Being in that "side" myself it is not that I don't use LLMs it is that I do not think LLMs are close to being able to replace me.

I also think there's some big variance in each of the "sides" (I think it is more a bimodal spectrum really) with a lot to you last point. Sometimes they save you lots of time, sometimes they waste a lot of time. I expect more senior people are going to get less benefits from them because they've already spent lots of time developing time saving strategies. Plus, writing lines is only a small part of the job. The planning and debugging stages are much more time intensive and can be much more difficult to wrangle an LLM with. Honestly I think it is a lot about trust. Forgetting "speed", do I trust myself to be more likely to catch errors in code that I write or code that I review?

Personally, I find that most of the time I end up arguing with the LLM over some critical detail and I've found Claude code will sometimes revert things that I asked it to change (these can be time consuming errors because they are often invisible). It gives the appearance of being productive (even feeling that way) but I think it is a lot more like if you spent time in a meeting vs time coding. Meetings can help and are very time consuming, but can also be a big waste of time when over used. Sometimes it is better to have two engineers go try out their methods independently and see what works out within the larger scope. Something is always learned too.