Identify, solve, verify
July 7, 2025
The more time I spend using LLMs for code, the less I worry for my career – even as their coding capabilities continue to improve.Using LLMs as part of my process helps me understand how much of my job isn’t just bashing out code.
My job is to identify problems that can be solved with code, then solve them, then verify that the solution works and has actually addressed the problem.A more advanced LLM may eventually be able to completely handle the middle piece. It can help with the first and last pieces, but only when operated by someone who understands both the problems to be solved and how to interact with the LLM to help solve them.
Source: Identify, solve, verify
A short but very salient piece by Simon Willison that I quote almost all of.
Of late one of the criticisms I see quite a bit about LLM based code generation is along the ones of ‘writing code isn’t the main thing software developers focus on’. Which is an astute observation. Nut it is certainly a nontrivial chink of what software engineers do.
So tools that free up a developer’s time provide more time to allocate elsewhere–as Simon observes here.
