The rest of the advice in there is sound, but without more specifics I don't know how actionable the section "The spectrum of AI-appropriate tasks" really is.
Basically same problem as copy paste coding, but LLM can (sometimes) know your exact variable names, types so it's easier to forget that you need to understand and check the code.
All via Cursor, some internal tools and Tines Workbench
Last I'd checked, Anthropic would not admit that they were degrading models for obvious scummy business reasons, but they are probably quantizing them, reducing beam search, lowering precision/sampling), etc. because the model goes from being superpowered to completely unusable, constantly dropping code and mangling files, getting caught in loops, doing the weirdest detours, and sometimes completely ignoring my instructions from just one message prior.
t first I wondered if Cursor was mishandling the context, and while they indeed aren't doing the best with context stuffing, the rest of the issues are not context-related.
Engineers think "the LLM can handle the simple code change, but if I ask for too much it'll fall over." Wrong. Modern LLMs can easily handle a 50-line function plus 50 lines of detailed comments explaining assumptions, performance implications, and what changes would invalidate this approach.
But most engineers are either asking for solutions without enough context or failing to ask the LLM to document its assumptions.
Then they're shocked when they have to reverse engineer out that the code assumes 100 users when they have 100k, or why it's doing individual API calls when they needed batch processing.
Most engineers have never seen good comments, so they don't know they can ask LLMs to write them.
The default LLM comment is just English pseudo-code: "this function takes a user ID and sends them a notification." Completely useless. But that's because most engineers have never experienced comments that explain trade-offs, performance implications, or future system evolution.
Writing clear technical explanations is genuinely difficult. Almost no one does it well. So when you ask an LLM for "comments," you get the same terrible pattern you've seen everywhere else.
But you can literally ask for explanations of assumptions, performance characteristics, and scenarios where this approach would break. The LLM handles it perfectly. You just have to know that's even possible. Makes the code review so much easier.
Most engineers don't, because they've never seen it done.
[1] https://peoplesgrocers.com/en/writing/asking-llms-the-right-...