this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2025
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This is about the same behavior I’m accustomed to. I will say that my current work is more greenfield at the moment.
First plan is about 60% there. And then we have a few iterations to get that in good shape.
Once the plan is together I send that to a virtual machine to implement the code with low/no supervision.
Then it goes into a draft PR that I will review and provide further guidance on changes or updates. Those iterations will happen on either my virtual or local machine, depending on how much the work is.
I could imagine It would be pretty difficult with hardware, where you have to compile, and potentially transfer to a chip to run or test further. But I will say, if you can give an LLM access to the whole loop of write, compile, test and reading error logs the results can sometimes be impressive.
I don't think that'd be much good when the way the specs are written are not based purely on technical merits. We also aren't paid to test hardware - we have hardware because we develop software to test hardware on. Knowing how to navigate those waters is the key skill. Once I've got a solution that'll work getting it implemented is relatively trivial as our approach is extremely atomic.
In general what you describe sounds like a tremendous amount more overhead than we currently have for little to no gain. What I could do with is a few more engineers that I could train up to have sufficient contextual knowledge, not another junior to babysit. I trained one up and he's tremendously useful - apart from when he leans too heavily on LLMs. That cost a side project two months of unnecessary faff and sapped team morale massively in the process. I ended up dragging the damn thing over the finish line after he refactored it into something that was exhausting to work with.
Gotcha – I have no doubts that LLMs can steer things to shit at breakneck speeds.
I certainly wouldn’t mind some more (competent) employees.