LLMs don't think outside the box

LLMs fail at laser-focused troubleshooting, but they excel at brute-force breadth. Priming an agent to list 50 distinct possible causes for a database connection failure and investigate each one of them works better than hoping it guesses the exact root cause.

The main take away from this article for me is that battle scars can be used to unbog these agents. That explains the current productivity divide we're seeing, seniors use their past experience to unbog agents. Juniors naturally frame the problem into the brute-force breadth approach. The problem then is focused on Mid-career devs that get the worst results because they are naturals on framing the problem on brute force way so they try to force agents through rigid logic without deep experience.