Coding with LLMs in the summer of 2025 (an update)

Summary

antirez 2 hours ago. 6475 views. Frontier LLMs such as Gemini 2.5 PRO, with their vast understanding of many topics and their ability to grasp thousands of lines of code in a few seconds, are able to extend and amplify the programmer capabilities. If you are able to describe problems in a clear way and, if you are able to accept the back and forth needed in order to work with LLMs, you can reach incredible results such as: 1. Eliminating bugs you introduced in your code before it ever hits any user: I experienced this with Vector Sets implementation of Redis. I would end eliminating all the bugs eventually, but many were just removed immediately by Gemini / Claude code reviews. 2. Explore faster how a given idea could work, by letting the LLM write the throw away code to test ASAP in order to see if a given solution is actually more performant, if it is good enough, and so forth. 3. Engage in pair-design activities where your instinct, experience, design taste can be mixed with the PhD-level knowledge encoded inside the LLM. In this activity, the LLM will sometimes propose stupid paths, other times incredibly bright ideas: you, the human, are there in order to escape local minimal and mistakes, and exploit the fact your digital friend knows of certain and various things more than any human can. 4. Accelerate your work by writing part of the code under your clear specifications. 5. Work with technologies far from your expertise but contiguous with what you can do (for instance: coding in 68000 assembly for an Amiga demo?) using LLMs as an extension of specific parts of your mind, for the knowledge you don't have. One and half years ago I wrote a blog post called “LLMs and programming in the first days of 2024”. There, I found LLMs to be already useful, but during these 1.5 years, the progresses they made completely changed the game. However, in order to leverage their capabilities, humans interacting with LLMs must have certain qualities and follow certain practices....