It seems to be relative to skill level. If you're less-experienced, you're letting these things write most if not all of your code. If you're more experienced, that's inverted (you write most of the code and let the AI safely pepper things in).
Don't rule out laziness! I'm a very experienced senior dev (full stack, embedded, Rust, Python, web everything, etc)... Could I have spent a ton of time learning the ins and outs of Yjs (and the very special way in which you can integrate it with TipRap/prosemirror) in order to implement a concise, collaborative editor? Sure.
Or I could just tell Claude Code to do it and then spend some time cleaning it up afterwards. I had that thing working quite robustly in days! D A Y S!
(Then I had the bright idea of implementing a "track changes" mode which I'm still working on like a week and a half later, haha)
Even if you were already familiar with all that stuff, it's a lot of code to write to make it work! The stylesheets alone... Ugh! So glad I could tell the AI something like, "make sure it implements light and dark mode using VueUse's `useDark()` feature."
Almost all of my "cleanup" work was just telling it about CSS classes it missed when adding dark mode variants. In fact, most of my prompts are asking it to add features (why not?) or cleaning up the code (e.g. divide things into smaller, more concise files—all the LLMs really love to make big .vue files).
"Writing most of the code"? No. Telling it how to write the code with a robust architecture, using knowledge developed over two decades of coding experience: Yes.
I have to reject some things because they'd introduce security vulnerabilities but for the most part I'm satisfied with Claude Code spits out. GPT5, on the other hand... Everything needs careful inspection.
Had a newer employee rewriting some functions with LLMs, but not really admitting to it. I don't really care about the LLM aspect and think it can be quite useful with learning, but I would like to see newer people learning the system before unleashing LLMs entirely on it if that makes any sense. The same developer had a pretty hard time getting an if statement correct that simply checked the length of a string. Lots of mentoring ahead...
But I dunno. I kind of wonder how I would have acted with tech like this available when I first started years ago. As a young engineer and even now I live and breathe the code, obsessing over testing and all the thing that make software engineering so fun. But I can't say whether or not I would have overdepended on an LLM as a young engineer.
It's all kind of depressing IMO, but it is what it is at this point.
