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Why LLMs can't really build software
(zed.dev)
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this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2025
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Citation needed. I don’t use one. If my coworkers do, they’re very quiet about it. More than half the posts I see promoting them, even as “just a tool,” are from people with obvious conflicts of interest. What’s “clear” to me is that the Overton window has been dragged kicking and screaming to the extreme end of the scale by five years of constant press releases masquerading as news and billions of dollars of market speculation.
I’m not going to delegate the easiest part of my job to something that’s undeniably worse at it. I’m not going to pass up opportunities to understand a system better in hopes of getting 30-minute tasks done in 10. And I’m definitely not going to pay for the privilege.
I've found them useful, sometimes, but nothing like a fraction of what the hype would suggest.
They're not adequate replacements for code reviewers, but getting an AI code review does let me occasionally fix a couple of blunders before I waste another human's time with them.
I've also had the occasional bit of luck with "why am I getting this error" questions, where it saved me 10 minutes of digging through the code myself.
"Create some test data and a smoke test for this feature" is another good timesaver for what would normally be very tedious drudge work.
What I have given up on is "implement a feature that does X" questions, because it invariably creates more work than it saves. Companies selling "type in your app idea and it'll write the code" solutions are snake-oil salesman.
I don't use one, and my coworkers that do use them are very loud about it, and worse at their jobs than they were a year ago.
https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/ai/
47% daily use
I have been using it a bit, still can't decide if it is useful or not though... It can occasionally suggest a blatantly obvious couple of lines of code here and there, but along the way I get inundated with annoying suggestions that are useless and I haven't gotten used to ignoring them.
I mostly work with a niche area the LLMs seem broadly clueless about, and prompt driven code is almost always useless except when dealing with a super boilerplate usage of a common library.
I do know some people that deal with amazingly mundane and common functions and they are amazed that it can pretty much do their jobs, but they never really impressed me before anyway and I wondered how they had a job...
Gee, guess why. Given the current culture of hate and ostracism I would never outright say IRL that I like it or use it a lot. I would say something like "yeah, I think it can sometimes be useful when used carefully and I sometimes use it too". While in reality it would mean that it actually writes 95% of code under my micromanagement.
Wut. At software shops the prevailing atmosphere is that you should use it and broadcast it as much as possible. This person's experience is not normal