alt Hacker NewsUsually, you don't want your developers to be coding monkeys, for good results. You need the human developer in the loop to even define the spec, maybe contributing ideas, but at the very least asking questions about "what happens when..." and "have you thought about...".
In fact, this is a huge chunk of the value a developer brings to the table.
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This is very much my experience from working with outsourced development. Almost by design, they tend to lack domain expertise or an intimate understanding of the cultures and engineering values of the company they're contracted out to.
This means that they will very quickly help you discover all the little details that seemed so obvious to you that you didn't even think to mention them, but were nonetheless critical to a successful implementation. The corollary to that is, the potential ROI of outsourcing is inversely proportional to how many of these little details your project has, and how important they are.
So far I've found LLM coding to be kind of the same. For projects where those details are relatively unimportant, they can save me a bunch of effort. But I would not want to let an LLM build and maintain something like an API or database schema. Doing a good job of those requires too much knowledge of expected usage patterns working through design tradeoffs. And they tend to be incredibly expensive to change after deployment so it pays to take your time and get your hands dirty.
I also kind of hate them for writing tests, for similar reasons. I know many people love them for it because writing tests isn't super happy fun times, but for my part I'm tired of dealing with LLM-generated test suites being so brittle that they actively hinder future development.
And this is usually one of the defining traits of a senior engineer. They understand the tech and its limitations, and thus are able to look around corners, ask good questions, and, overall, provide quality product input.