I never said anything against using LLMs. You're projecting.

Any engineer worth their weight will always try to avoid adding code. Any amount of code you add to a system, whether is written by you or a all knowing AI is a liability. If you spent a majority of your work day writing code it's understandable to want to rely heavily on LLMs.

Where I'd like for people to draw a line on is not knowing at all what the X thousand lines of code are doing.

In my career, I have never been in a situation where my problems could be a solved by piecing together code from SO. When I say "spend those few minutes doing it yourself" I am specifically talking about UI, but it does apply to other situations too.

For instance, if you had to change your UI layout to something specific. You could try to collect screenshots and articulate what you need to see changed. If you weren't clear enough that cycle of prompting with the AI would waste your time, you could've just made the change yourself.

There are many instances where the latter option is going to be faster and more accurate. This would only be possible if you had some idea of your code base.

When you've let an agent take full control of your codebase you will have to sink time into understanding it. Since clearly everyone is too busy for that you get stuck in a loop, the only way to make those "last 10%" changes is *only* via the agent.