Most people I've seen complain say things like "I asked it for code and it didn't compile."

The real magic of LLMs comes when they iterate until completion until the code compiles and the test passes, and you don't even bother looking at it until then.

Each step is pretty stupid, but the ability to very quickly doggedly keep at it until success quite often produces great work.

If you don't have linters that are checking for valid syntax and approved coding style, if you don't have tests to ensure the LLM doesn't screw up the code, you don't have good CI, you're going to have a bad time.

LLMs are just like extremely bright but sloppy junior devs - if you think about putting the same guardrails in place for your project you would for that case, things tend to work very well - you're giving the LLM a chance to check its work and self correct.

It's the agentic loop that makes it work, not the single-shot output of an LLM.

Providing instruction and context doesn’t seem like a “workaround”.

IME it does fail pretty hard at first. One has to build up a little library of markdown and internal library of prompt techniques. Then it starts working okay. I agree there is a hurdle still, trying it on one task doesn't really get one over the hurdle.