Software engineer describes gap between personal LLM experience and HN consensus on developer obsolescence

A back-end engineer at a large company reports that their team uses Claude (Opus 4.6) via Cursor for daily development tasks after a company mandate, but remains skeptical of the productivity claims common on Hacker News.

The engineer's front-end team reports speed improvements of 20–50% with LLM-maximalist practices, while a back-end integration team abandoned similar practices after encountering too many errors and high token costs despite strong test coverage.

The engineer and senior colleagues find that Cursor and Claude require significant micro-management to produce usable results, and manual code review remains necessary in their workflow—a gap between their day-to-day experience and the HN consensus that LLMs have already made most developers obsolete.