The LLM you're coding with is a product, tuned by people whose business depends on your next prompt. That incentive quietly punishes an honest "I'm not sure," because it reads as weakness, and it pays out for a confident answer that sounds right whether or not it actually is.
The path to programming expertise used to run through breaking your own code and debugging the wreckage, over and over. LLMs pulled that grind out from under the whole process. Junior devs now learn by reviewing AI-generated code instead of writing it from scratch.
A food critic can't necessarily plate at Michelin level, and it doesn't matter. Knowing a dish is wrong is its own thing, same as an editor fixing a novel she couldn't have written herself. That skill is the one LLMs keep pushing forward.
They make the cost split visible. Coming up with what to say is the heavy lift, and review gets to skip it, since the work is already on the screen for you to poke at.
Old news, really. "Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal" (1983) mocked structured programming as "quiche eating," and every abstraction after it caught the same flak from people who liked the layer below.
I've quit reading review-first work as a slide into softness. Looks like specialization from where I sit. The people getting ahead are the ones who can look at a working feature and still say we don't need this one.