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Walking the Tightrope of LLMs for Software Development: A Practitioners’ Perspective
Citation. Ferino, S., Hoda, R., Grundy, J., & Treude, C. (2025). Walking the Tightrope of LLMs for Software Development: A Practitioners’ Perspective. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2511.06428
Summary. This preprint reports a socio-technical grounded-theory study of how software practitioners experience the benefits, challenges, and management of LLM use in software development. Across interviews conducted from October 2024 to September 2025, it frames LLM use as a set of trade-offs spanning individual developers, teams, organizations, and society, rather than as uniformly beneficial automation.
Key claims
- The study’s 22 practitioner interviews identify reported benefits including sustained developer flow, improved mental models, and entrepreneurship, alongside challenges including reputational harm and risks to developer skill practice.
- Participants describe LLM use as potentially supporting debugging, time saving, reduced effort, and learning while also creating overreliance and incomplete mental models of code.
- The authors recommend context-sensitive practices for balancing these trade-offs, including retaining developer control through uses such as code improvement and test-driven development rather than relying solely on code generation.
Evidence & limitations
- Evidence comes from 22 software-practitioner interviews across three iterative data-collection and analysis rounds using socio-technical grounded theory.
- This is arXiv v2, revised 2026-05-21; its findings are qualitative and practitioner-reported, so it supports mechanism and experience claims rather than estimates of average productivity or causal effects.
- Public provenance was verified from the arXiv landing page and the PDF’s title-page metadata; Crossref exact-title results did not identify a matching published DOI.