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Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster. A shockingly inefficient trillion-dollar project.
(www.theatlantic.com)
this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2026
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Technology
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Efficiency is relative, if there is a solution that uses less resources then the other solution is more efficient, but if there is no other solution then the solution is the most efficient.
Is using fable 5 to do 2+2 efficient? No, because a calculator can do that with less resources
Is using fable 5 to rewrite a code base from zig to rust efficient? Maybe since the only other solution is a human it depends on how you compare human resources to compute resources. Time wise it'll probably take the human longer since they require breaks.
This is only true if your only metric for 'success' is lines of code written.
LLMs will output code much faster than a human can type, there's no doubt about that. But when you consider how terrible even the frontier models still are at the architecture and maintenance side of the process, humans are still way, way more efficient.
There's a lot of variation in quality with humans though.
I don't doubt that there are some engineers better then the frontier models at coding considering architecture, maintenance performance etc. Those engineers tend to be more expensive though. I
don't think an average engineer is better then the frontier models though, and say an entry level engineer fresh out of a boot camp would be significantly worse then even a tier 2 model.
Having worked closely with junior engineers and with high-end models, I strongly disagree. In almost all cases the output of the juniors is on par or better (albeit slower) than the LLMs ,and unlike an LLM, a junior actually learns and becomes much more consistent than the AI over time.