| That lonely/downtime section at the end is a giant red flag for me. It looks like the sort of nonproductive yak-shaving you do when you're stuck or avoiding an unpleasant task--coasting, fooling around incrementally with your LLM because your project's fucked and you psychologically need some sense of progress. The opposite of this is burnout--one of the things they don't tell you about successful projects with good tools is they induce much more burnout than doomed projects. There's a sort of Amdahl's Law in effect, where all the tooling just gives you more time to focus on the actual fundamentals of the product/project/problem you’re trying to address, which is stressful and mentally taxing even when it works. Fucking around with LLM coding tools, otoh, is very fun, and like constantly clean-rebuilding your whole (doomed) project, gives you both some downtime and a sense of forward momentum--look how much the computer is chugging! The reality testing to see if the tool is really helping is to sit down with a concrete goal and a (near) hard deadline. Every time I've tried to use an LLM under these conditions it just fails catastrophically--I don't just get stuck, I realize how basically every implicit decision embedded in the LLM output has an unacceptably high likelihood of being wrong, and I have an amount of debug cycles ahead of me exceeding the time to throw it all away and do it without the LLM by, like, an order of magnitude. I'm not an LLM-coding hater and I've been doing AI stuff that's worked for decades, but current offerings I've tried aren't even close to productive compared to searching for code that already exists on the web. |