I have been seeing this sort of mindset frequently in response to agentic / LLM coding. I believe it to be incorrect. Coding agents w Claude 4 Opus are far more useful and accurate than these comments suggest. I use LLMs everyday in my job as a performance engineer at a big company to write complex code. It helps a ton.
The caveat is that user approach makes all the difference. You can easily end up with these bad experiences if you use it incorrectly. You need to break down your task into manageable chunks of moderate size/complexity, and then specify all detail and context rigorously, almost to the level of pseudocode, and then re-prompt any misunderstandings (and fail fast and restart if LLM misunderstands). You get an intuition for how to best communite with the LLM. There’s a skill and learning curve to using LLMs for coding. It is a different type of workflow. It is unintuitive
that this would be true, (that one would have to practice and get better at using them) and that’s why I think you see takes waving off LLMs so often.
The caveat is that user approach makes all the difference. You can easily end up with these bad experiences if you use it incorrectly. You need to break down your task into manageable chunks of moderate size/complexity, and then specify all detail and context rigorously, almost to the level of pseudocode, and then re-prompt any misunderstandings (and fail fast and restart if LLM misunderstands). You get an intuition for how to best communite with the LLM. There’s a skill and learning curve to using LLMs for coding. It is a different type of workflow. It is unintuitive that this would be true, (that one would have to practice and get better at using them) and that’s why I think you see takes waving off LLMs so often.