> In an effort to impress the user and over-deliver, LLMs end up creating a rat’s nest of ultra-defensive code littered with debugging statementsIn an effort to impress the user and over-deliver, LLMs end up creating a rat’s nest of ultra-defensive code littered with debugging statements

This has been my experience as well. I have to continuously explicitly instruct Claude to be more concise (though that often leads to broken code ...). Gemini is even more verbose.

I'm not sure in the end how much time is saved over simple good auto-completes (for method syntax lookups), other than for rote tasks like "replicate this pattern across X" (and even then it doesn't get it 100% right), and for quick answers to specific questions usually in frameworks I'm not that well versed it that I would have searched SO for ("how do I do X in Qt?", "how do I do the equivalent of Y in Linux on Windows")--but even then I have to verify the answer, whereas if it's a highly voted answer on SO I'll know it works (or there will be helpful comments to the contrary under the reply).

Most of the "it can build X app for you automatically" comments I read remind me of "build a Rails app in 5 lines" (back in the day).