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MrScruffyesterday at 7:08 AM0 repliesview on HN

In general, the frontier models are not capable of reliably authoring non-trivial code without careful oversight yet. They are great at producing code that can pass tests, but not neccessarily a code review. This means if you care about code quality you still need a human in a loop understanding what has been done, and that becomes the bottleneck. And less disciplined folks will indeed become increasingly dependent.

However, over time the complexity of problems where you can get away with less/no oversight is increasing. And the models are already great at solving certain classes of problems where one doesn't really care that much about code quality, that wouldn't have even been attempted in a pre-LLM world. Over the weekend I was using Claude to add features to the compiled (no source available) firmware of one of my audio devices, adding workflow features by patching assembly and custom DSP code.

In coding, as with other areas, what's emerging is jagged intelligence.