If this is true then we wouldn't have senior engineers that delegate. My suggestion is to think a couple more cycles before hitting that reply button. It'll save us all from reading obviously and confidently wrong statements.

AI aren't real people… You do that with real people because you can't just rsync their knowledge.

Only on this website of completely reality detached individuals such an obvious comment would be needed.

So...you don't think you can give LLMs more knowledge ?? You're the one operating in detached reality. The reality is that a ton of engineers are finding LLMs useful, such as the author.

Maybe consider if you don't find it useful you're working on problems that it's not good at, or even more likely, you just suck at using the tools.

Anybody that finds value out of LLMs has a hard time understanding how one would conclude they are useless and you can't "give it instructions because that's that hard part" but it's actually really easy to understand. The folks that think this are just bad at it. We aren't living in some detached reality. The reality is that some people are just better than others

If you have a dumb AI and a good AI, why not just use the good AI?

Senior engineers delegate in part because they're coaxed into a faux-management role (all of the responsibilities, none of the privileges). Coding is done by juniors; by the time anyone gains enough experience to finally begin to know what they're doing, they're relegated to "mentoring" and "training" new cohort of fresh juniors.

Explains a lot about software quality these days.

Or you know, they are leading big initiatives and cant do it all by themselves. Seniors can also delegate to other seniors. I am beyond senior with 11YOE and still code on a ton of my initiatives.

It is a task that LLMs are quite good at.

If the LLM actually could generate good steps that helped make forward progress then there would be no problem at all making agents, but agents are really bad so LLM can't be good at that.

If you feel those tips are good then you are just a bad judge of tips, there is a reason self help books sell so well even though they don't really help anyone, their goal is to write a lot of tips that sound good since they are kind of vague and general but doesn't really help the reader.

I use agentic LLMs every single day and get tremendous value. Asking the LLM to produce a set of bite-sized tasks with built-in corrective reminders is something that they're really good at. It gives good results.

I'm sorry if you're using it wrong.

Seconding. In the past months, when using Aider, I've been using the approach of discussing a piece of work (new project, larger change), and asking the model to prepare a plan of action. After possibly some little back and forth, I approve the plan and ask LLM to create or update a specification document for the project and a plan document which documents a sequence of changes broken down into bite-sized tasks - the latter is there to keep both me and the LLM on track. With that set, I can just keep repeatedly telling it to "continue implementation of the plan", and it does exactly that.

Eventually it'll do something wrong or I realize I wanted things differently, which necessitates some further conversation, but other than that, it's just "go on" until we run out of plan, then devising a new plan, rinse repeat.

This is pretty much what I do. It works very well.