LLMs, natively, are better at programming than nearly every professional software engineer, full stop. There are a lot of meta tasks (not programming, software engineering) that they are worse at, but the actual programming part, they've transcended human potential.
You have to treat them like an ignorant junior engineer in nearly every respect, but trying to match with them at programming per se is a fool's errand.
The reason to read the code is not because you can catch their errors in programming. It's because they may have missed the forest for the trees at the operational or strategic level, and so that you can learn from them to understand better. It's like trying to beat the engine in chess now.
You have to treat them like an ignorant junior engineer in nearly every respect, but trying to match with them at programming per se is a fool's errand.
The reason to read the code is not because you can catch their errors in programming. It's because they may have missed the forest for the trees at the operational or strategic level, and so that you can learn from them to understand better. It's like trying to beat the engine in chess now.