> and met a complete wall trying to explain why LLMs aren't useful for programming - at least not yet. I argue the code is often of low quality, very unmaintainable, and usually not useful outside quick experimentation.

There are quite a few things they can do reasonably well - but they mostly are useful for experienced programmers/architecs as a time safer. Working with a LLM for that often reminds me of when I had many young, inexperienced Indians to work with - the LLM comes up with the same nonsense, lies and excuses, but unlike the inexperienced humans I can insult it guilt free, which also sometimes gets it back on track.

> They refuse to believe it, even though they do hit a wall with their vibe-coded project after a few months when claude stops generating miracles any more - they lack the experience with code to understand they are hitting maintainability issues.

For having a LLM operate on a complete code base there currently seems to be a hard limit of something like 10k-15k LOC, even with the models with the largest context windows - after that, if you want to continue using a LLM, you'll have to make it work only on a specific subsection of the project, and manually provide the required context.

Now the "getting to 10k LOC" _can_ be sped up significantly by using a LLM. Ideally refactor stupid along the way already - which can be made a bit easier by building in sensible steps (which again requires experience). From my experiments once you've finished that initial step you'll then spend roughly 4-5 times the amount of time you just spent with the LLM to make the code base actually maintainable. For my test projects, I roughly spent one day building it up, rest of the week getting it maintainable. Fully manual would've taken me 2-3 weeks, so it saved time - but only because I do have experience with what I'm doing.