213
LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
(human-in-the-loop.bearblog.dev)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2026
213 points (98.2% liked)
Programming
27223 readers
373 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding here.
All of the qualities that make a codebase easier to read, maintain, and consume by humans do the same things for LLMs.
A codebase designed for humans is a codebase that is designed for LLMs. It's just that most teams don't even know how to design a codebase for humans. And those same teams just kind of accept LLM and Agent Slop as "Designed for LLMs". When it most definitely is not.
All these things matter just as much for humans as they do for LLMs. And like I said previously, most human developers don't understand these things and do not optimize for them anyways. Which means that most human developers are ill-equipped to create codebases that are not degrading rapidly under the use of agents.
This is a bit of a rant of mine... because I've spent the last decade learning how to optimize software engineering to best fit the needs of humans. Now that LLMs are crashing onto the scene, teams that already were writing slop by hand can now write slop at twenty times the rate. And then seem to think that all the things that make for good software no longer apply to them
Some of these are arguably much more important for LLMs because of limited context sizes. The more of the code in the context window follows good practice, the more likely the LLM is to align with it. Any nonsense in the context window will multiply and beat that one document with the style guide that the LLM might not even see.