I think that in general there is a big difference between javascript/typescript projects big or small and other projects that actually address a specific project domain. These two are not the same. The same claude code agent can create a lot of parts of a function web project, but will struggle providing anything functional but a base frame for you to build on if you were to create a new SoC support in some drone firmware.

The problem is that everyone working on those more serious projects knows that and treats LLMs accordingly, but the people that come from the web space come in with the expectation that they can replicate the success they have in their domain just as easily, when oftentimes you need to have some domain knowledge.

I think the difference simply comes down to the sheer volume of training material, i.e. web projects on github. Most "engineers" are actually just framework consumers and within those frameworks llms work great.

Most of the stuff I'm talking about here came out in November. There hasn't been much time for professional teams to build new things with it yet, especially given the holidays!

For what it’s worth, I have Claude coding away at Unreal Engine codebase. That’s a pretty large c++ codebase and it’s having no trouble at all. Just a cool several million lines of C++ lovely.

Everything is made of smaller parts. I'd like to think we can sub divide a code base into isolated modules at least.

That’s right, but it also hints at a solution: split big code bases into parts that are roughly the size of a big hobby project. You’ll need to write some docs to be effective at it, which also helps agents. CICD means continuous integration continuous documentation now.

I worked at Slack earlier this year. Slack adopted Cursor as an option in December of 2024 if memory serves correctly. I had just had a project cut due to a lot of unfortunate reasons so I was working on it with one other engineer. It was a rewrite of a massive and old Python code base that ran Slack's internal service catalog. The only reason I was able to finish rewrites of the backend, frontend, and build an SLO sub-system is because of coding agents. Up until December I'd been doing that entire rewrite through sixteen hour days and just pure sweat equity.

Again, that codebase is millions of lines of Python code and frankly the agents weren't as good then as they are now. I carefully used globbing rules in Cursor to navigate coding and testing standards. I had a rule that functioned as how people use agents.md now, which was put on every prompt. That honestly got me a lot more mileage than you'd think. A lot of the outcomes of these tools are how you use them and how good your developer experience is. If professional software engineers have to think about how to navigate and iterate on different parts of your code, then an LLM will find it doubly difficult.