I held out for a long time, but I finally started using LLMs in my regular coding work. I couldn't deny the utility of tools like Claude any longer, when it can do in 2 minutes what would take me an hour.
There are problems: hallucinations, verbosity, bad/unperformant/inaccessible code. I have to correct it a lot. That's OK.
The main problem I find is that it's sucked a lot of the fun out of coding for me. It's like I've been pushed into a management role when I just wanted to stay a coder.
The other issue of course is that I'm not learning as much when I use LLMs. Even if it's an iterative, back-and-forth process, the tool is doing ~80% of the thinking for me.
It feels like I either need to spend more time learning outside of coding, or just accept at some level that I'm "cashing in my chips" and relying on ~20 years of actual coding experience.
Either way, I feel less excited by these tools than defeated. They're incredible magic wands, but I kind of liked doing my own sorcery?
Of course, this is a choice: I *could* choose not to use LLMs. When I ride my bike, I don't bemoan the fact that a car could do it faster – the goal is exercise.
But nobody's paying me to ride my bike. If I were a delivery driver, it'd be pretty unprofessional to show up an hour late with a cold pizza just because I like biking.
With LLMs, it almost feels like malpractice *not* to use them at this point. I can't justify taking ~3x longer to ship a feature just because I don't enjoy using them.
@nolan To be honest, I have not invested very much in trying to use the LLMs for programming...
But I think if your job was to debug / fix timeout exceptions (which are almost certainly not *real* timeouts) in some million line horrible Java app from 10+ years ago, You would feel a lot more "job security" when it comes to this stuff.
Even if you do create an app using LLMs and its easier and faster to do, It's not going to be any easier, or faster to maintain that app or Figure out why it's not working when it breaks.
