[agumonkey]

I think there are two groups of people emerging. deep / fast / craft-and-decomposition-loving vs black box / outcome-only.

I've seen people unable to work at average speed on small features suddenly reach above average output through a llm cli and I could sense the pride in them. Which is at odds with my experience of work.. I love to dig down, know a lot, model and find abstractions on my own. There a llm will 1) not understand how my brain work 2) produce something workable but that requires me to stretch mentally.. and most of the time I leave numb. In the last month I've seen many people expressing similar views.

ps: thanks everybody for the answers, interesting to read your pov

[remich]

I get what you're saying, but I would say that this does not match my own experience. For me, prior to the agentic coding era, the problem was always that I had way more ideas for features, tools, or projects than I had the capacity to build when I had to confront the work of building everything by hand, also dealing with the inevitable difficulties in procrastination and getting started.

I am a very above-average engineer when it comes to speed at completing work well, whether that's typing speed or comprehension speed, and still these tools have felt like giving me a jetpack for my mind. I can get things done in weeks that would have taken me months before, and that opens up space to consider new areas that I wouldn't have even bothered exploring before because I would not have had the time to execute on them well.

[jaapz]

I think the comprehension part is very important.

When I write my own code without an LLM, it is an extension of my own thinking, my own mental model.

But when I use an LLM, that LLM produces code that I need to comprehend, understand. It's like I'm continually reading some other developers' code, and having to understand their mental model and way of thinking to truly understand the code.

For me, this is very tiring. It just costs more energy for me to review and read other people's code than when I write it myself.

[ronsor]

The sibling comments (from remich and sanufar) match my experience.

1. I do love getting into the details of code, but I don't mind having an LLM handle boilerplate.

2. There isn't a binary between having an LLM generate all the code and writing it all myself.

3. I still do most of the design work because LLMs often make questionable design decisions.

4. Sometimes I simply want a program to solve a problem (outcome-focused) over a project to work on (craft-focused). Sometimes I need a small program in order to focus on the larger project, and being able to delegate that work has made it more enjoyable.

[zahlman]

> I do love getting into the details of code, but I don't mind having an LLM handle boilerplate.

My usual thought is that boilerplate tells me, by existing, where the system is most flawed.

I do like the idea of having a tool that quickly patches the problem while also forcing me to think about its presence.

> There isn't a binary between having an LLM generate all the code and writing it all myself. I still do most of the design work because LLMs often make questionable design decisions.

One workflow that makes sense to me is to have the LLM commit on a branch; fix simple issues instead of trying to make it work (with all the worry of context poisoning); refactor on the same branch; merge; and then repeat for the next feature — starting more or less from scratch except for the agent config (CLAUDE.md etc.). Does that sound about right? Maybe you do something less formal?

> Sometimes I simply want a program to solve a purpose (outcome-focused) over a project to work on (craft-focused). Sometimes I need a small program in order to focus on the larger project, and being able to delegate that work has made it more enjoyable.

Yeah, that sounds about right.

[sanufar]

I think for me, the difference really comes down to how much ownership I want to take in regards to the project. If it’s something like a custom kernel that I’m building, the real fun is in reading through docs, learning about systems, and trying to craft the perfect abstractions; but if it’s wiring up a simple pipeline that sends me a text whenever my bus arrives, I’m happy to let an LLM crank that out for me.

I’ve realized that a lot of my coding is on this personal satisfaction vs utility matrix and llms let me focus a lot more energy onto high satisfaction projects

[zahlman]

> deep / fast / craft-and-decomposition-loving vs black box / outcome-only

As a (self-reported) craft-and-decomposition lover, I wouldn't call the process "fast".

Certainly it's much faster than if I were trying to take the same approach without the same skills; and certainly I could slow it down with over-engineering. (And "deep" absolutely fits.) But the people I've known that I'd characterize as strongly "outcome-only", were certainly capable of sustaining some pretty high delta-LoC per day.