I have been consistently skeptical of LLM coding but the latest batch of models seems to have crossed some threshold. Just like everyone, I've been reading lots of news about LLMs. A week ago I decided to give Claude a serious try - use it as the main tool for my current work, with a thought out context file, planning etc. The results are impressive, it took about four hours to do a non-trivial refactor I had wanted but would have needed a few days to complete myself. A simpler feature where I'd need an hour of mostly mechanical work got completed in ten minutes by Claude.
But, I was keeping a close eye on Claude's plan and gradual changes. On several occasions I corrected the model because it was going to do something too complicated, or neglected a corner case that might occur, or other such issues that need actual technical skill to spot.
Sure, now a PM whose only skills are PowerPoint and office politics can create a product demo, change the output formatting in a real program and so on. But the PM has no technical understanding and can't even prompt well, let alone guide the LLM as it makes a wrong choice.
Technical experts should be in as much demand as ever, once the delirious "nobody will need to touch code ever again gives way to a realistic understanding that LLMs, like every other tool, work much better in expert hands. The bigger question to me is how new experts are going to appear. If nobody's hiring junior devs because LLMs can do junior work faster and cheaper, how is anyone going to become an expert?
> I have been consistently skeptical of LLM coding but the latest batch of models seems to have crossed some threshold.
It’s refreshing to hear I’m not the only one who feels this way. I went from using almost none of my copilot quota to burning through half of it in 3 days after switching to sonnet 4.6. I’m about to have to start lobbying for more tokens or buy my own subscription because it’s just that much more useful now.
Yes, it's Sonnet 4.6 for me as well as the most impressive inflection point. I guess I find Anthropic's models to be the best, even before I found Sonnet 3.7 to be the only model that produced reasonable results, but now Sonnet 4.6 is genuinely useful. It seems to have resolved Claude's tendency to "fix" test failures by changing tests to expect the current output, it does a good job planning features, and I've been impressed by this model also telling me not to do things - like it would say, we can save 50 lines of code in this module but the resulting code would be much harder to read so it's better not to. Previous models in my experience all suffered from constantly wanting to make more changes, and more, and more.
I'm still not ready to sing praises about how awesome LLMs are, but after two years of incremental improvements since the first ChatGPT release, I feel these late-2025 models are the first substantial qualitative improvement.
I have been consistently skeptical of LLM coding but the latest batch of models seems to have crossed some threshold. Just like everyone, I've been reading lots of news about LLMs. A week ago I decided to give Claude a serious try - use it as the main tool for my current work, with a thought out context file, planning etc. The results are impressive, it took about four hours to do a non-trivial refactor I had wanted but would have needed a few days to complete myself. A simpler feature where I'd need an hour of mostly mechanical work got completed in ten minutes by Claude.
But, I was keeping a close eye on Claude's plan and gradual changes. On several occasions I corrected the model because it was going to do something too complicated, or neglected a corner case that might occur, or other such issues that need actual technical skill to spot.
Sure, now a PM whose only skills are PowerPoint and office politics can create a product demo, change the output formatting in a real program and so on. But the PM has no technical understanding and can't even prompt well, let alone guide the LLM as it makes a wrong choice.
Technical experts should be in as much demand as ever, once the delirious "nobody will need to touch code ever again gives way to a realistic understanding that LLMs, like every other tool, work much better in expert hands. The bigger question to me is how new experts are going to appear. If nobody's hiring junior devs because LLMs can do junior work faster and cheaper, how is anyone going to become an expert?