Using LLMs at Oxide

It's funny that I've seen people both argue that LLMs are exclusively useful only to beginners who know next to nothing and also that they are only useful if you are a 50+ YoE veteran at the top of their craft who started programming with punch cards since they were 5-years-old.

I wonder which of these camps are right.

Both camps, for different reasons.

For novices, LLMs are infinitely patient rubber ducks. They unstick the stuck; helping people past the coding and system management hurdles that once required deep dives through Stack Overflow and esoteric blog posts. When an explanation doesn’t land, they’ll reframe until one does. And because they’re confidently wrong often enough, learning to spot their errors becomes part of the curriculum.

For experienced engineers, they’re tireless boilerplate generators, dynamic linters, and a fresh set of eyes at 2am when no one else is around to ask. They handle the mechanical work so you can focus on the interesting problems.

The caveat for both: intentionality matters. They reward users who know what they’re looking for and punish those who outsource judgment entirely.