In the end, my immediate productivity with LLM is a lot lower than before. But I assume that quality is a bit higher, at least in the long run, because issues fixed early saves a lot of time later.
I guess I don't use LLMs like a lot of other people. In fact I continue to write most code myself and I just use LLM to aid me or to generate something that's very similar to existing entity and just requires careful copy&paste&replace. My only fear is that this approach to work is not very popular and I might be asked one day to switch to wipe code, which I don't enjoy at all.
You may caveat what type of software you are talking about, like complex or out-of-the-ordinary, and say that llms are still bad at that. Fine. But LLMs are actively being used for developing thousands of websites all the time - you can see several examples of them on hackernews every week.
Amount of lines is irrelevant when talking about a landing page or a huge number of internal tools that people are building at the moment. At least until a certain point.
Any programmer should be able to hack one up. LLMs are good at _programming_, but I haven't seen evidence they are good at engineering yet. But then again, many people with the title "software engineer" are not great at it either.
Engineering normally requires thinking long term and if you want to use LLMs it needs to be way more structured. For this use-case LLMs are on way more shaky ground.
Or like the internal tool I whipped up in a few days to try out how we can structure some specific data we have internally in our company.
When pouring concrete, I'm not going to use expensive hardwood to frame the concrete base, I'm gonna use stuff that's just strong enough. It's going down the bin anyway.
A lot of internal tools are fine if they are just good enough, they don't really need to be that maintainable if 2 people are gonna use it every once in a while