this post was submitted on 10 May 2026
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I have over 25 years of development experience. My current role is vice president of development and architecture where I lead a team of 80+ devs, QAs, and architects. By any measure, I am one of those "engineer level" developers you speak of.
Yes, LLMs are a tool, but it's a tool one should use sparingly. LLMs are pattern recognition machines and are great for routine, been-there-done-that type development. For anything that deviates from the norm, LLMs will try to force everything back into common patterns... even when those patterns are not correct. A well designed system can be mangled into junk because the LLM doesn't have enough context or because something is new.
Be skeptical of the rave reviews around coding agents and the use of LLMs for development. Much of the hype seems tied to developer skill. Less capable developers can use LLMs to appear more capable than they are. For good developers, LLMs seem to erode their skills as they rely on the tool instead of their own knowledge. I have seen this first hand.
Overall, it seems LLMs raise skills of bad developers and hamper the skills of good developers. It's creating a bunch of middling developers who are incapable of handling anything novel or complex.
Sounds good. Pretty sure you are correct on most points. Agentic coding is bullshit for sure. I'm mostly talking partner coding, code review and some data interpretation like screenshots of UI changes in a CI for example.
For what it's worth, my initial comment was concerning partner coding as well.
Wen was the last time you actually wrote something production level yourself?
The goalpost escalation I constantly see in these threads is both hilarious and deeply frustrating.
"You need to be a good dev to use these!" "I am a good dev and these tools suck."
"No like you need to be enterprise level good" "I am an enterprise level dev with credentials far exceeding the baseline offered."
"No but you need to have written code recently!!" "I was writing code yesterday."
I am now waiting for the obligatory "well your coworkers must just be fixing all your code you screw up" because the pro-ai crowd has no argument for the tech not based on "u suk".
Yes. It’s “AI can never fail. It can only be failed.”
I'm not pro AI or anti AI. I am anti big tech though, which makes the discussion more complicated.
Regarding escalation, a non coding team lead isn't a dev. A CTO isn't a dev. A software architect isn't a dev. A software developer is a dev. That's not an escalation, it's a fact.
Just because you lead a team of devs, doesn't mean you are a software developer, you could've gone to business school, never written a line of code and just started leading a team of software developers because you learned "how to lead". And there are different kinds of team leads, those that get their hands dirty and those that don't.
So no, being a CTO, CEO, or whatever C you want to put in front of your title doesn't make you "far exceed" any qualification. I actually think that kind of thinking is the problem workers are underpaid: people who lead actually often exceedingly overestimate their abilities in the craft they lead. "I lead a team of athletes, that means I'm a good athlete". Do you understand how crazy that sounds?
Friday.
@onlinepersona prompting chatgpt right now
Imagine you're a worker of any kind. Some kid from university with a business degree and no experience in your job becomes team leader. They've learned to "lead". Does that make them an expert in your craft?
I'm not sure what you're getting at. By definition, an "expert" is someone with a lot of "experience". Your hypothetical kid has "no experience". Since we know that 1+1=2, I think we can deduce that the answer to your question is no.
The person I was responding to was equating their experience as a leader to being an expert in software development. And even if they had been a good developer 5, 10, or 15 years ago, that doesn't make them stay an expert. Either you're working in the field with the relevant experience, and position, or you're not.
Your qualifications as a software developer don't magically increase to say "far exceed the required qualifications" just because you lead a team, a division, or a company. Otherwise Satya Nadella, Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos would be the best software developers in the world.
It seems it was recent enough to spell common words correctly