Why I stopped using LLMs to generate code (and what I use instead)

I want to be precise about what I mean by that title, because it's easy to read it as anti-AI and it isn't.

I use LLMs every day. I used one to write this article's first outline. I use them to parse prose, extract structure, and summarise documents. They're genuinely useful for that.

What I stopped using them for is generating application code — the part where the output needs to be correct, reproducible, and deployable without a week of cleanup.

Here's why, and what I built instead.

The problem with LLM-generated code isn't the code itself