LLMs: Code Generation Speedup, But Understanding Remains the Bottleneck

The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has dramatically increased code generation speed. However, this hasn't solved the real bottlenecks in software engineering: code reviews, knowledge transfer, testing, debugging, and team collaboration. The article argues that LLMs lower the cost of writing code, but the cost of understanding, testing, and trusting that code is higher than ever. LLM-generated code can be hard to understand, violate established conventions, or introduce unintended side effects, increasing review and maintenance difficulty. Ultimately, software engineering still relies on team trust, shared context, and meticulous code review—these are the keys to efficiency.