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Although I'll be happy to use LLMs for nightmare stuff like dependency management. So I guess it's about figuring out which part of development you enjoy and which part drains you, and refusing to let it take the former from you.
Something I like about our weird new LLM-assisted world is the number of people I know who are coding again, having mostly stopped as they moved into management roles or lost their personal side project time to becoming parents. AI assistance means you can get something useful done in half an hour, or even while you are doing other stuff. You don't need to carve out 2-4 hours to ramp up any more. If you have signific…
I took time during a holiday to write an Obsidian plugin 4 years ago to scratch a personal itch as it were. I promptly forgot most of the detail, the Obsidian plugin API and ecosystem have naturally changed since then, and Typescript isn't in my day-to-day lingo.
I've been collecting ideas for new plugins since then while dreading the investment needed to get back up to speed on how to implement them.
I took a couple hours over a recent winter holiday with Claude and cranked out two new plugins plus improvements to the 4 year old bit-rotting original. Claude handled much of the accidental complexity of ramping up that would have bogged me down in the past--suggesting appropriate API methods to use, writing idiomatic TS, addressing linter findings, ...
In order for me to be comfortable with a code base and consider it mine I need to have written the foundation, not merely reviewed in. Once the pillars are there, LLMs do make further development faster and I can concentrate on fun details (like tinkering with CSS or thinking about some very specific details).
Of course its fun. Making slop _is_ very fun. Its a low-effort dopamine-driven way of producing things. Learning is uncomfortable. Improving things using only your braincells can be very difficult and time consuming.
Not learning anything while you use them is a choice. You can choose differently!
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Only it’s a bit like me getting back into cooking because I described the dish I want to a trainee cook.
Isn't that still considered cooking? If I describe the dish I want, and someone else makes it for me, I was still the catalyst for that dish. It would not have existed without me. So yes, I did cook it.
The person who actually cooked it cooked it. Being the "catalyst" doesn't make you the creator, nor does it mean you get to claim that you did the work.
Otherwise you could say you "cooked a meal" every time you went to MacDonald's.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't that still considered cooking? If I describe the dish I want, and someone else makes it for me, I was still the catalyst for that dish. It would not have existed without me. So yes, I did cook it.
> If I describe the dish I want, and someone else makes it for me, I was still the catalyst for that dish. It would not have existed without me. So yes, I did "cook" it. The person who actually cooked it cooked it. Being the "catalyst" doesn't make you the creator, nor does it mean you get to claim that you did the work. Otherwise you could say you "cooked a meal" every time you went to MacDonald's.
Something I like about our weird new LLM-assisted world is the number of people I know who are coding again, having mostly stopped as they moved into management roles or lost their personal side project time to becoming parents. AI assistance means you can get something useful done in half an hour, or even while you are doing other stuff. You don't need to carve out 2-4 hours to ramp up any more. If you have signific…
This matches my experience. A recent anecdote: I took time during a holiday to write an Obsidian plugin 4 years ago to scratch a personal itch as it were. I promptly forgot most of the detail, the Obsidian plugin API and ecosystem have naturally changed since then, and Typescript isn't in my day-to-day lingo. I've been collecting ideas for new plugins since then while dreading the investment needed to get back up to…
Now I can genuinely point Claude Code at them and say "upgrade this to the latest versions" and it will do most of that tedious work for me.
I can even have it fill in some missing tests and gaps in the documentation at the same time.
Without prior software dev experience people may take what the LLM gives them at face value, and that's where the slop comes from imho.