You have a lot of control over LLM quality. There is different models available. Even with different effort settings of those models you have different outcomes.

E.g. look at the "SWE-Bench Pro (public)" heading in this page: https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-5-4/ , showing reasoning efforts from none to high.

Of course, they don't learn like humans so you can't do the trick of hiring someone less senior but with great potential and then mentor them. Instead it's more of an up front price you have to pay. The top models at the highest settings obviously form a ceiling though.

You also have control over the workflow they follow and the standards you expect them to stick through, through multiple layers of context. Expecting a model to understand your workflow and standards without doing the effort of writing them down is like expecting a new hire to know them without any onboarding. Allowing bad AI code into your production pipeline is a skill issue.

Imagine you opened a job posting and had all applicants complete SWE-bench.

Ignoring the useless/unqualified candidates and models, human applicants have a much wider range of talent for you to choose from than the top models + tooling.

The frontier models + tooling are, in the grand scheme of things, basically equivalent at any given moment.

Humans can be just as bad as the worst models, but models are no where near as good as the best humans.