I still need to understand every single line of the code to be responsible for it, and that takes the majority of time anyway, and quite often I need to rewrite most of it, because average code is not particularly good, because most code wasn’t produced by senior professionals, but random people making a random python script with only Hello World under their belt. So at the end doesn’t really matter whether I copy paste from a source, or an LLM does the same.
I understand that many coder are happy with the “John made his first script in his life” level of code, but I’m paid well because I can do better, way better. Especially because I need to be responsible for my code, because the companies to whom I work are forced to be responsible.
But of course, when there is no responsibility, I don’t care either. For those home projects where there is exactly zero risks. Even big names seem to use these only to those kind of projects. When they don’t really care.
But these days I run a one-man business, and LLMs (currently Claude Code, previously GPT) have written me a ton of great code. To be clear, when I say "great" I don't mean up to your standards of code quality; rather, I mean that it does what I need it to do and saves me a bunch of time.
I've got a great internal dashboard that pulls in data from a few places, and right now CC is adding some functionality to a script that does my end of month financial spreadsheet update. I have a script that filters inbound leads (I buy e-commerce brands, generally from marketplaces that send me an inordinate amount of emails that I previously had to wade through myself in order to find the rare gem). On the non-code front, I have a very long prompt that basically does the first pass of analysis of prospective acquisitions, and I use Shortcut.ai to clean up some of the P&Ls I get (I buy small e-commerce brands, so the finances are frequently bad).
So while I can't speak to using LLMs to write code if you're working in any sort of real SaaS business, I can definitely say that there's real, valid code to be had from these things for other uses.