Tag: code-review

The LLM you're coding with isn't a tool; it's a product, tuned by people whose business depends on your next prompt. Calibrated uncertainty reads as weakness. Confidence reads as competence. Guess which one gets rewarded.

For decades, the path to programming expertise ran through syntax struggle—writing, breaking, debugging, repeat. LLMs just eliminated that grind. Junior devs now learn by reviewing AI-generated code instead of writing from scratch.

Food critics who can't cook at Michelin level. Editors who don't write novels. Casting directors who can't act.

Different skills, not lesser skills?

LLMs are revealing something we usually sweep under the rug: generation and evaluation are cognitively asymmetric. Research on utterance planning shows construction is harder than execution. Starting with nothing costs more cognitive load than refining something that already exists.

This phenomenon isn't new. "Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal" (1983) mocked structured programming as "quiche eating." Every abstraction faced resistance from people who valued control over leverage.

Review-first programming isn't a decline. It's specialization. And the developers adapting fastest aren't the ones who generate the most code. They're the ones who know what not to build.