Do they? I’ve never got a response that something was impossible, or stupid. LLMs are happy to verify that a noop does nothing, if they don’t know how to fix something. They rather make something useless than really tackle a problem, if they can make tests green that way, or they can claim that something “works”.

And’ve I never asked Claude Code something which is really impossible, or even really difficult.

To be fair, that happening feels more like poor management and mentorship than "juniors are scatterbrained".

Over time, you build up the right reflexes that avoid a one-week goose chase with them. Heck, since we're working with people, you don't just say " fix this", you earmark time to make sure everyone is aligned on what needs done and what the plan is.

An LLM might take 5 minutes, or 20 minutes, and still do the wrong thing. Rarely have I seen an LLM not "know what to do." A coworker told it to fix some unit tests, it churned away for a while, then changed a bunch of assert status == 200 to 500. Good news, tests pass now!

> At least the LLM will only take 5 minutes to tell you they don't know what to do.

In my experience, the LLM will happily try the wrong thing over and over for hours. It rarely will say it doesn’t know.