The Architecture of Laziness: Why LLMs Are Fundamentally Designed to Cut Corners
AI-assisted development tools are everywhere - systems that understand code, generate tests, fix bugs, and accelerate delivery. But practitioners are hitting a wall. Despite sophisticated prompts, quality controls, and multi-agent workflows, LLMs consistently cut corners on complex work. The problem isn’t training or prompt engineering - it’s architectural. TL;DR LLMs optimize for different objectives than human developers. The “laziness” comes from training to satisfy human approval patterns rather than correctness. My sophisticated workflows work against this optimization. ...