> [David, Former staff engineer at Google ... CTO of Tailscale,] doesn't need LLMs. That he says LLMs make him more productive at all as a hands-on developer, especially around first drafts on a new idea, means a lot to me...

Don't doubt for a second the pedigree of founding engs at Tailscale, but David is careful to point out exactly why LLMs work for them (but might not for others):

   I am doing a particular kind of programming, product development, which could be roughly described as trying to bring programs to a user through a robust interface. That means I am building a lot, throwing away a lot, and bouncing around between environments. Some days I mostly write typescript, some days mostly Go. I spent a week in a C++ codebase last month exploring an idea, and just had an opportunity to learn the HTTP server-side events format. I am all over the place, constantly forgetting and relearning.

  If you spend more time proving your optimization of a cryptographic algorithm is not vulnerable to timing attacks than you do writing the code, I don't think any of my observations here are going to be useful to you.