Particularly when the human acts as the router/architect.
However, I've found Claude Code and Co only really work well for bootstrapping projects.
If you largely accept their edits unchanged, your codebase will accrue massive technical debt over time and ultimately slow you down vs semi-automatic LLM use.
It will probably change once the approach to large scale design gets more formalized and structured.
We ultimately need optimized DSLs and aggressive use of stateless sub-modules/abstractions that can be implemented in isolation to minimize the amount of context required for any one LLM invocation.
Yes, AI will one shot crappy static sites. And you can vibe code up to some level of complexity before it falls apart or slows dramatically.
I have been coding for 20+ years and I have used AI agents for coding a lot, especially for the last month and a half. I can't say for sure they make me faster.They definitely do for some tasks, but over all? I can solve some tasks really quickly, but at the same time my understanding of the code is not as good as it was before. I am much less confident that is is correct.
LLMs clearly make junior and mid level engineers faster, but it is much harder to say for Senior.
There's such a wide divergence of experience with these tools. Often times people will say that anyone finding incredible value in them must not be very good. Or that they fall down when you get deep enough into a project.
I think the reality is that to really understand these tools, you need to open your mind to a different way of working than we've all become accustomed to. I say this as someone who's made a lot of software, for a long time now. (Quite successfully too!)
In someways, while the ladder may be getting pulled up on Junior developers, I think they're also poised to be able to really utilize these tools in a way that those of us with older, more rigid ways of thinking about software development might miss.
3 years ago the idea of measuring productivity in lines of code would have been ridiculous. After AI, it is the norm.