This is not slightly comical, it is very comical. Side projects are not mandatory, if you are using them to learn something, asking LLMs to generate and for you to type it makes no sense - just do it on your own. If you want to offload tedious boilerplate part to LLM, then by definition no need to learn it as it is tedious, so typing it out is useless.
Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code
161–170 of 479 posts
Re: Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Cooking a steak and then flushing it straight down the toilet outperforms all the slow and tedious business of eating and digesting it, too. That would be more equivalent to writing the code and immediately deleting it. Except this code is being deployed, and it is still (mostly) functional, at least functional enough to satisfy your employer (their “hunger” in your analogy). > Why should I use an LLM to write code…
> Except this code is being deployed, and it is still (mostly) functional, at least functional enough to satisfy your employer (their “hunger” in your analogy). Bzzzt. Wrong. I don't give a fuck who's satisfied by my code. I only care about writing it. > Because your employer is convinced that it can do the job they want it to Bzzzt. Wrong. The code is incorrect because it is not precisely the code I would have writt…
Thing is, companies don’t care if it’s not your code or your view of it. If it works, that’s what they want. Since I stopped typing code I’ve been using my time to play some video games, read some books etc while the agents do the boring stuff (work itself). I get paid, the company is more productive, I got a bonus and a raise, everyone’s happy.
Re: Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
> With AI, our role also shifts. It's mainly to know what to spend effort on, to set priorities and, to be able to verbalize requirements, missing social context and unwritten rules, to anticipate what additional documents the agent needs, to prioritize deadlines, feature necessity, and other judgment calls. Did you not do that before AI? It’s so strange to me when people are calling out these kind of tasks like they…
> Did you not do that before AI? It’s so strange to me when people are calling out these kind of tasks like they were not already a requirement for the job. What were you doing before? No, you didn't have to explicitly say it in words. My mind doesn't run on internal monologue. Many people can just do their work without ever having reflected on it in words. Tacit knowledge, routines, shared assumptions and culture in…
Llms are a relational responsive reasoning interface, not a mind.
Re: Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But a big yes for still typing code by hand, and not leaving it to the llm. Except it has to be the code generated by your brain. > That is what will create new neurons and new connections, which is what will keep away the cognitive decline. 100% agree with this. The problem is, your employer doesn’t care whether your brain is creating new neurons and connections. They care about productivity and profit. I feel lik…
I feel like there is an unspoken assumption of long term maintainability when it comes to LLM generated software. We are still very early in this, so I don't want to make assumptions. In principle, it shouldn't be impossible to both write and maintain stable software, purely with agents. At least, I'm not aware of any actual reasons, backed by a proper theory. On the other hand. I've noticed some persistent issues wi…
I agree with everything you said.
I’m simply playing devil’s advocate, because engineers can believe one thing, but until employers believe it, it doesn’t matter much.
I’m also not convinced that the reality of LLMs will never catch up with what employers think they can do.
It may never happen, but it very well could.
Either way, I feel the days of employers being ok with handwriting code are limited.
Re: Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code
#165Do mathematicians and physicists put away the calculator and computer (this always reminds me of the last scene from Star Wars) and do the computation by hand? A physicist isn't going to manually invert a 10,000x10,000 matrix.
Exactly as we don't write machine code letting the compiler do that, now and in the near future we won't be writing high level programming language code. We are moving towards working on a higher level of abstraction.
When I ask a frontier model to write a loop 10 different ways in Python and TypeScript and test the performance of each using a 1,000,000 iterations, it isn't creating cognitive debt. For the time being, I'm still racking my brain asking the question, how does garbage collection affect the performance.
Re: Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But a big yes for still typing code by hand, and not leaving it to the llm. Except it has to be the code generated by your brain. > That is what will create new neurons and new connections, which is what will keep away the cognitive decline. 100% agree with this. The problem is, your employer doesn’t care whether your brain is creating new neurons and connections. They care about productivity and profit. I feel lik…
I feel like there is an unspoken assumption of long term maintainability when it comes to LLM generated software. We are still very early in this, so I don't want to make assumptions. In principle, it shouldn't be impossible to both write and maintain stable software, purely with agents. At least, I'm not aware of any actual reasons, backed by a proper theory. On the other hand. I've noticed some persistent issues wi…
It's a moot point. In Mag7 companies internal code gets thrown away within 2 years on average because of contract negotiations, new opensource projects that obviate need for the internal codebase, license changes, layoffs, etc, etc. We don't need long term maintainability because its already on its way to the garbage bin. Frankly it's always been this way.
Re: Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Did you not do that before AI? It’s so strange to me when people are calling out these kind of tasks like they were not already a requirement for the job. What were you doing before? No, you didn't have to explicitly say it in words. My mind doesn't run on internal monologue. Many people can just do their work without ever having reflected on it in words. Tacit knowledge, routines, shared assumptions and culture in…
Llms are a relational responsive reasoning interface, not a mind.
The point is that you have to have an idea of what it has access to in its context. Many expect it to work like an omniscient genie and then give up once it turns out that it can't read your mind and you have to be able to halfway-coherently state what you want.
Re: Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code
#168You are cooked if you can’t actually write better code than llm. Try reading some books or documentation
Frontier LLMs write better code at CRUD tasks than 95% of developers today. They’ll get to 95% of most niche coding domains by December and likely all coding tasks sometime next year; 99% better at all tasks by December 2028. You may be correct now and it doesn’t matter one bit.
I'd say as long as we can clearly see the 5% are working better than an LLM, why not strive for it? Shows what humans are capable of, and it's probably achievable to most.
I'm not hanging my hat yet and can still see where LLMs struggle. I think it's the best bet you can make: keep working for the future where you'll still be needed, because you can't prepare for the future where you're not.
Re: Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code
#169Big no for retyping llm generated code by hand. But a big yes for still typing code by hand, and not leaving it to the llm. Except it has to be the code generated by your brain. That is what will create new neurons and new connections, which is what will keep away the cognitive decline. And the constraint of not having to use llms will enhance creativity. Actually, the constraints llms add to your code are more in nu…
There are jobs where llms can massively speed up delivery. Think about tiny/one man indie games for example, they can also get (stolen) assets almost for free. Helping with hobby projects, a subtype of that one man show. Then there are sluggish corporate jobs. Here, even 10x speed up of development won't change delivery dates significantly or at all. I am in one such job, team leader has claude code higher tier and b…
Copying is not theft.
Re: Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code
#170Lots of reactions here, but if it works for you then that's great.
For me I feel that LLMs have exploded (in a good way) my cognitive capabilities. I'm now the general of an army, rather than playing the role of a soldier. Of course that means that I lose the experience of being the lonely soldier, but it is a no-brainer tradeoff for me.
Anyway, I have to go now so I can push my car to the grocery store (so I don't forget how to walk), me and my giant calves will be back in a few hours.
All meant in good spirit. Keep doing what you're doing, thanks for sharing, and hope people are kind and only give good natured ribbings.