this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2026
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Programming
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Honest question. If you claim you are not good enough to build it, how can you evaluate that what you are getting is good or not?
Not who you asked, and I don't mean this to sound pompous. I don't believe (there's probably some but go with me for a minute) there's any software task I couldn't do, given enough time to research the domain and understand the problem space.
When folks say they couldn't do it before, it doesn't mean they aren't mentally capable to do the task, it's the time or speed constraints that are in play. What coding agents do help you close that gap. It doesn't make you an expert in the field, but as an example it can help you understand the domain, nomenclature, acronyms that you would have had to research.
This doesn't invalidate your ability to judge a solution as good or bad. It also doesn't prevent the agent from using code you don't understand either, so you still have to figure things out but it can help speed some of those up.
I'm not the one you asked, but I bet they get paid, either way.
Knowing if the delivery is correct or not - is the job of their boss (or their boss, or their boss, etc). And that accountable person is - by the laws of probability and publicly traded compamy capitalism - probably an idiot. Lol.
Yeh, fair question.
Recently I built a Non Linear Editor for Vimeo VODs.
The server downloads the VOD, extracts key frames using FFMPEG, allows the user to create a bunch of sections and where they get uploaded to, then FFMPEG does a stream copy to extract those sections, and then upload them.
I knew all of that was possible. I had never done HTML5 video players, I had never spawned FFMPEG from typescript, there was a lot of html/CSS that I didn't have experience with.
Previously, I would have passed on this work.
But after defining a plugin system for source/destination (so it can be used with YouTube or whatever), and splitting each stage into workers, the code itself is fairly easy to evaluate.
I didn't need to know how to get to the result, I just knew what shape the result should look like so I could drive the LLM, and then I just had to read the result and google anything I didn't understand.
And ultimately, I don't really care "if it's good or not". The definition of "good" is that it works and is robust. Other than that, it's looking for code smells.
I guess I am lucky that most of my work is "one and done" instead of long-term support.
Yeah ok fair, for "one and done" projects I do indeed believe that LLMs can be a useful tool. For maintainable code instead of write-once code, which is what I am 99% working with, I believe they suck. So my definition of "good" would be a lot stricter.