How I use LLMs as a staff engineer in 2026

A bit over a year ago I wrote How I use LLMs as a staff engineer. Here’s a brief summary of what I used AI for last year: Smart autocomplete with Copilot Short tactical changes in areas I don’t know well (always reviewed by a SME) Writing lots of use-once-and-throwaway research code Asking lots of questions to learn about new topics (e.g. the Unity game engine) Last-resort bugfixes, just in case it can figure it out immediately Big-picture proofreading for long-form English communication Here are some tasks I explicitly didn’t use AI for last year: Writing whole PRs for me in areas I’m familiar with Writing ADRs or other technical communications Research in large codebases and finding out how things are done February 2025 was a long time ago. Back then the best model was the first reasoning model, OpenAI’s o1. Agents sort of worked, but would often get stuck or thrown off by compaction. What’s changed since then? Agents are good now The biggest change is that I now use LLMs to produce…