I had a discussion with a friend the other day, and an example made there brought some clarity to my thinking about LLMs and how they’re currently being used in dev workflows.
A significant number of developers that I interview describe their dev workflow as, effectively, managing the LLMs as if they were a team of junior engineers. The developer does the planning and architecture work, perhaps with collaboration from an LLM agent, and then sends out the tasks to individual coding agents to do implementation. Finally, the results are aggregated and the developer reviews it all before signing off on it.
Author’s Note: I started writing this back in January of 2026, as a way to work through my thoughts on genAI, especially w.r.t. using it as part of a software development workflow. I kept working on it slowly, but never quite got around to finishing it. It’s been sitting untouched for long enough that I’m pushing it out of the nest to fly or crash on it’s merits.
The main points, and my concerns, have not changed over the intervening year. In fact, they’ve only gotten stronger as I’ve watched the AI bubble turn into a bonafide cult, and we see the rather remarkable changes in behavior that come from widespread usage of genAI in the general populace.
Over the years, I’ve become more and more enamored with static assets. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a place for dynamically generated content. But after spending 15+ years building webapps and websites, I’ve reached the point where I truly think the majority of the web is overcomplicated. Wordpress should die in a fire.
Harsh? Yes, probably. But the primary benefit that Wordpress provides is that it enables users to produce their own content and publish it immediately, rather than relying on a developer of some flavor to make the changes in code and push it up to the server. 15 years ago, that was revolutionary and the explosion of cheap Wordpress hosting is the proof in the pudding. Realistically, cPanel exists almost completely because Wordpress shattered the website industry and took over.