The question then becomes, can LLMs generate code close to the same quality as professionals.

In my experience, they are not even close.

We should qualify that kind of statement, as it’s valuable to define just what percentile of “professional developers” the quality falls into. It will likely never replace p90 developers for example, but it’s better than somewhere between there and p10. Arbitrary numbers for examples.

Can you quantify the quality of a p90 or p10 developer?

I would frame it differently. There are developers successfully shipping product X. Those developer are, on average, as skilled as necessary to work on project X. else they would have moved on or the project would have failed.

Can LLMs produce the same level of quality as project X developers? The only projects I know of where this is true are toy and hobby projects.

> Can you quantify the quality of a p90 or p10 developer?

Of course not, you have switched “quality” in this statement to modify the developer instead of their work. Regarding the work, each project, as you agree with me on from your reply, has an average quality for its code. Some developers bring that down on the whole, others bring it up. An LLM would have a place somewhere on that spectrum.