Post by @partofthevoice@lemmy.zip

2026-10-21 17:36 UTC

LLMs make dumb shit by default. Even Linus had a race condition caught in review when he used AI to bulldoze his way through a feature. Agentic loops have major flaws which humans don’t, a tradeoff you seem to keep ignoring while you suggest that developers and agents are comparable in their output quality. The only comparison is, at surface value, they both produce code. Deeper than that, there are plenty of tradeoffs. Yes tradeoffs in code quality, project quality, maintainability, technical debt, … you need to be a good programmer to get a good project out of an agent — and even that isn’t enough at times.

Replies (1)

@ChairmanMeow@programming.dev 2026-10-22 15:20

At the architectural level, there’s definitely a difference yes. But at the smaller scoped implementation level the latest models are pretty good compared to humans. Not perfect by any means, sure, but it’s not all drivel anymore. It was 2 years ago, but today’s definitely different. Race conditions are generally harder to catch, even for human devs. And you’re saying it as if Linus wouldn’t have introduced it had he coded everything by hand, which I don’t think is remotely guaranteed (like he never makes mistakes). And the review system clearly works just fine still. Good developers can accelerate their work with agents, and you’re right that you can generate tons of LLM-powered slop with it too. But that’s why dismissing anything an agent wrote immediately is also wrong. The review determines if it’s good enough, whether a human or an agent wrote it.

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