I found out that some teams at my company are doing the same thing. They’re using it to fix simple issues like exceptions and security issues that don’t need many code changes. I’d be shocked if it were any different at your friend’s company. It’s just surprising to me that that’s all he was doing?

LLMs can be very effective but if I’m writing complex code with them, they always require multiple rounds of iteration. They just can’t retain enough context or maintain it accurately without making mistakes.

I think some clever context engineering can help with that, but at the end of the day it’s a known limitation of LLMs. They’re really good at doing text-based things faster than we can, but the human brain just has an absolutely enormous capacity for storing information.