In theory, people ought to check every LLM output. This collides with reality in different points;

people are lazy and being diligent just passively checking results is hard - and can be very tiring

people are under pressure to work faster

if they really check everything, the result is often slower.

As a result, careful checks of each result won’t happen.

I know that by experience because I have a coworker who uses LLMs heavily. I am relying on interfaces he should provide and he is often not able to describe them in an usable way. Thinks that should take a day or two often take many weeks.

God yes I can relate to that. I have a similar "full vibe-coder" coworker who sent me a PR for something that amounted to 1,000's of lines of code changes. I rejected it out-of-hand. We had a long conversation about readable PRs, breaking work up into chunks, etc. Of course he had Claude do all that for him but... at least the PR was "better".

And the same trouble with him not having any clue what he just produced actually did. I 100% agree that's a problem. But it's kinda the same problem we had before LLM, though maybe a bit super-charged. That fella's code before Claude was terrible as well. So technically the code itself is better now so.... I guess that's a win?

You could argue it is a competence problem, so maybe yes but LLMs apparently augment such problems.

Yeah - give bad drivers faster cars and people will die faster. I hear that. We do need to train people better on how to use these tools. It's definitely NOT "go vibe code a thing into existence and then drop it on others to maintain". But I don't think "bury your head in the sand and hope it goes away" is the right approach either.

We evaluate suggestions from people differently. For example, we use cues like use of language, certificates, reputation, personality, prior experience with them, and insitutions to evaluate their competence - and we trust then, with a reason. You won’t go to a barber shop and ask a random person working there for a stomach surgery.

Sure. But you can do that with LLMs too. They have strengths and weaknesses as well. But to understand how to use these tools appropriately you need to gain experience with them. To know when they tend to produce good results (well known and well documented languages and libraries) and when to be more "sus" about them (obscure libraries, poorly documented applications (coughOraclecough)).

The more you use them the more you get to see when it's struggling.