It sucks at the one thing it's supposed to be good at (writing code).
It sucks at replacing software engineers. So yes, if you expect it to design a complex scalable system and implement it for you from start to finish, then sure, you can call it bad at "writing code".
I don't care about that use-case. I think I am decently good at writing code, and I rather enjoy doing it. I find Claude Code/Gemini CLI extremely helpful at both saving me lots of time by freeing me from dealing with annoying boilerplate, so I can focus more on actual system design (which LLMs fail at terribly, if we are talking about real production apps that need to scale) and more difficult/fun parts of code (which LLMs cannot handle either).
That's the real power of it, multiplying the productive output of good SWEs + making the work feel more enjoyable for them, by letting those SWEs focus on actual tricky/difficult parts, instead of forcing them to spend a good half of the time just dealing with boilerplate.
And I am not even gonna bother getting into tons of other non-coding tasks it is already very useful of. I find it amazing that I can now not only get a transcript of my work meetings (which is already massively helpful for me to review later, as opposed to listening to a ~25min video recording of it), but also ask an LLM to summarize it for me or parse/extract info from it.
Comments
It sucks at replacing software engineers. So yes, if you expect it to design a complex scalable system and implement it for you from start to finish, then sure, you can call it bad at "writing code".
I don't care about that use-case. I think I am decently good at writing code, and I rather enjoy doing it. I find Claude Code/Gemini CLI extremely helpful at both saving me lots of time by freeing me from dealing with annoying boilerplate, so I can focus more on actual system design (which LLMs fail at terribly, if we are talking about real production apps that need to scale) and more difficult/fun parts of code (which LLMs cannot handle either).
That's the real power of it, multiplying the productive output of good SWEs + making the work feel more enjoyable for them, by letting those SWEs focus on actual tricky/difficult parts, instead of forcing them to spend a good half of the time just dealing with boilerplate.
And I am not even gonna bother getting into tons of other non-coding tasks it is already very useful of. I find it amazing that I can now not only get a transcript of my work meetings (which is already massively helpful for me to review later, as opposed to listening to a ~25min video recording of it), but also ask an LLM to summarize it for me or parse/extract info from it.