2x, not 10x: coding with LLMs in 2026

Calibrate your enthusiasm

Something I've learned about myself over the past 6 months is that if I ever discover Harry Potter is nonfiction and magic is real, my reaction will be approximately "OK that's interesting, but is this magic stuff good for anything more complex than writing unit tests?" LLMs have certainly passed that threshold of usefulness, though as of July 2026 and based solely on my own direct observations, they still have fundamental limitations such that I have not yet taken up woodworking as a contingency plan for "Software Engineer" becoming an extinct profession. Based on my mental model of why…

saved by

• Lailah Nabegu

related reading

• The growing divide between AI hype and software engineering realityoptimizedbyotto.com
• LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do – the human in the loophuman-in-the-loop.bearblog.dev
• The Project of Software is Completesubstack.com
• crawshaw - 2025-01-06crawshaw.io
• Here’s how I use LLMs to help me write codesimonwillison.net
• Malleable software in the age of LLMsgeoffreylitt.com
• What We’ve Learned From A Year of Building with LLMs – Applied LLMsapplied-llms.org
• 2025 LLM Year in Review – karpathykarpathy.bearblog.dev
• Code is cheap. Show me the talk. - nadh.innadh.in
• 2025: The year in LLMssimonwillison.net
• How I use LLMs as a staff engineerseangoedecke.com
• Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome | Hacker Newsnews.ycombinator.com