Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code

Knowledge abstractions have historically been built by people with a detailed understanding of a problem domain and with a period of vetting the abstraction by many people. That is simply not true with LLM-generated code. We do not really understand what techniques LLMs are using to understand directions, value aesthetic/legibility characteristics, assess tradeoffs, retrieve contextual information, generate output, etc. Embedded in everything LLMs do are small decisions.

If you reach for formulas that you don't understand the applicability of, you will similarly get bad outcomes! But a calculator has almost no resemblance to what happens when you give general instructions to an LLM and get a generated code back, because in between that prompt and the result are many layers of decisions you the developer did not make and likely will not understand without carefully assessing the output!

If you have no discomfort with being culpable for something and doing none of the work to understand it, by all means, don't do anything to understand the output! Don't read the code, don't re-type the result, etc. I have concerns that you'll have a job in a year, but that's your decision to make!

Managers never got to write and internalize every line of code anyway. Arguably their essential skill is producing useful stuff without needing to do so. So is that 'cognitive debt'? When I use an agent to code, I do the same things: I validate the direction, organization, and core decisions, but delegate the details. It's an intentional calculation of risk, managing the scope of future problems if there's a failure of implementation somewhere.

It's a question of where you put the value of cognitive focus. I don't understand 'line by line' how my car's ICE works, even though it will likely impact me at some point, because while I might be able to fix it myself if it breaks, the likely applied solution will be to delegate that work anyway.

This is part of how I learned how to code! Well, sans LLMs. Instead of copypasta-ing code blocks from books, Expert Sexchange and Stack Overflow, I manually retyped everything, looked up what I didn't understand and changed what I could.

What ended up happening is that I was typing, I'd notice little weird bits here and there, and I'd ask questions about it, explore alternatives, etc. So the end result was partially generated by ChatGPT, but also partially influenced by me.

But the biggest win was that within 3-4 hours, I was comfortable enough with the syntax that I was writing it entirely by hand, without AI assistance.

Now, if all you're doing is literally typing the characters and not thinking at all about what you're typing, and if you accept the LLMs output verbatim, then yes I'd say that you aren't really learning anything. But this is no different than just copying things from Stack Overflow. That behavior is nothing new.

The core distinction, as always, is whether you are exercising your brain.