The highest quality codebase

Claude is really good at specific analysis, but really terrible at open-ended problems.

"Hey claude, I get this error message: <X>", and it'll often find the root cause quicker than I could.

"Hey claude, anything I could do to improve Y?", and it'll struggle beyond the basics that a linter might suggest.

It suggested enthusiastically a library for <work domain> and it was all "Recommended" about it, but when I pointed out that the library had been considered and rejected because <issue>, it understood and wrote up why that library suffered from that issue and why it was therefore unsuitable.

There's a significant blind-spot in current LLMs related to blue-sky thinking and creative problem solving. It can do structured problems very well, and it can transform unstructured data very well, but it can't deal with unstructured problems very well.

That may well change, so I don't want to embed that thought too deeply into my own priors, because the LLM space seems to evolve rapidly. I wouldn't want to find myself blind to the progress because I write it off from a class of problems.

But right now, the best way to help an LLM is have a deep understanding of the problem domain yourself, and just leverage it to do the grunt-work that you'd find boring.

That's why you treat it like a junior dev. You do the fun stuff of supervising the product, overseeing design and implementation, breaking up the work, and reviewing the outputs. It does the boring stuff of actually writing the code.

I am phenomenally productive this way, I am happier at my job, and its quality of work is extremely high as long as I occasionally have it stop and self-review it's progress against the style principles articulated in its AGENTS.md file. (As it tends to forget a lot of rules like DRY)

Cool cool cool. So if you use LLMs as junior devs, let me ask you how future awesome senior devs like you will come around? From WHAT job experience? From what coding struggle?

My last job there was effectively a gun held to the back of my head, ordering me to use this stuff. And this started about a year ago, when the tooling for agentic dev was absolutely atrocious, because we had a CTO who had the biggest most raging boner for anything that offered even a whiff of "AI".

Unfortunately the bar is being raised on us. If you can't hang with the new order you are out of a job. I promise I was one of the holdouts who resisted this the most. It's probably why I got laid off last spring.

Thankfully, as of this last summer, agentic dev started to really get good, and my opinion made a complete 180. I used the off time to knock out a personal project in a month or two's worth of time, that would have taken me a year+ the old way. I leveraged that experience to get me where I am now.

Ok, now assume you start relying on it and let's assume cloud flare has another outage. You just go and clock out for the day saying "can't work, agent is down"?

I don't think we'll be out of jobs. Maybe temporarily. But those jobs come back. The energy and money drain that LLMs are, are just not sustainable.

I mean, it's cool that you got the project knocked out in a month or two, but if you'd sit down now without an LLM and try to measure the quality of that codebase, would you be 100% content? Speed is not always a good metric. Sure, 1 -2 months for a project is nice, but isn't especially a personal project more about the fun of doing the project and learning something from it and sharpening your skills?