Idk about that hot take. If you can’t deliver solid code with frontier models you are holding it wrong, full stop. If you can’t deliver crisp, tight, standards compliant code that follows your development policy with LLMs, you wouldn’t have any luck with a team of junior developers either.

OTOH , a lot of people, including people that should know better (looking at you, Netflix) are definitely holding it wrong.

In my experience, managing LLMs is much easier than managing an office of junior engineers, And more productive at 1/10 the cost. Now where the next crop of wise seniors engineers is going to come from, well, that’s a different problem.

LLMs are like 7 year olds with PHDs and coke.

I develop mission critical firmware using AI agents. I run a full agentic office, 10-50 agents at a time most days. If you don’t have almost as much documentation as you do code, you’re probably going to have a bad day. Documentation driven development is the happy path.

You need docs on your coding standards, your review methods, your test coverage standards, your protocol specifications, your build plans, the plan delta/decision matrix, user stories, etc etc etc.

In the LLM age, documentation is code at the highest level of abstraction. The LLM is a transpiler.

The loop is constantly planning, naively reviewing of the plan, implementing, test coverage, contract review, naive review of the delta, delta of the delta fix, test coverage review, maybe repeat back a few steps, then finally passing the proposed fix off to engineering governance, which maintains the standards docs. Engineering review doesn’t write code, it gates merges. It might be accepted with fixes, or it might be rejected as worse than the problem it solves.

The key concept here is that the documentation and the code are reviewed together. Where they are non coherent one or the other must be resolved. That’s where human judgment steps in when engineering governance isn’t absolutely sure of the intent. The docs are always kept coherent with the code.

The “one weird trick” that makes it work is -incentive management-. It costs nothing for gov to send work back to the drawing board. The agent’s try really hard to avoid that outcome. If gov had to write the fix , half the crap would pass right under the radar.

This works because I emphasise compaction as a metamorphosis that involves a loss of continuity for the model, “old you, new you” and they go through an abbreviated version of the onboarding after compaction (a good idea anyway) so they budget tokens like it’s the elixir of life. It’s weird but it works. Also, totes worth it to ride through the compaction. A totally fresh model can take half a day to really be in the groove.