> A good engineer, without LLM assistance, will still produce great stuff.
Not fast enough to keep their job these days.
Time was always the limiting factor to code quality, good engineers satisfied the classic "good", "fast" but not "cheap" selection of those three classic options.
I very sincerely doubt it is possible for even an incredible engineer to keep up with the delivery schedules required to ship products now. Not to mention that frontier models do ship pretty consistently good code. By far the biggest source of issues I see is not "poorly coded" but "problem poorly specified". We still need good engineers, because they can understand how to do decompose problems well, but I don't know anyone who writes code by and anymore (other than for fun).
Not fast enough to keep their job these days.
Time was always the limiting factor to code quality, good engineers satisfied the classic "good", "fast" but not "cheap" selection of those three classic options.
I very sincerely doubt it is possible for even an incredible engineer to keep up with the delivery schedules required to ship products now. Not to mention that frontier models do ship pretty consistently good code. By far the biggest source of issues I see is not "poorly coded" but "problem poorly specified". We still need good engineers, because they can understand how to do decompose problems well, but I don't know anyone who writes code by and anymore (other than for fun).