Devs gaining little (if anything) from AI coding assistants

“Using LLMs to improve your productivity requires both the LLM to be competitive with an actual human in its abilities and the actual user to know how to use the LLM most efficiently,” he says. “The LLM does not possess critical thinking, self-awareness, or the ability to think.”

There’s a difference between writing a few lines of code and full-fledged software development, Gekht adds. Coding is like writing a sentence, while development is like writing a novel, he suggests.

“Software development is 90% brain function — understanding the requirements, designing the system, and considering limitations and restrictions,” he adds. “Converting all this knowledge and understanding into actual code is a simpler part of the job.”