Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code

Realistically, LLMs write code much better than most people. In my domain, there are areas where I still write better code than an LLM, especially when it comes to physical constraints it might not understand, but there are far more domains where the LLM writes much better code than I do. In that sense, writing code with an LLM and keeping track of it feels more helpful than I expected.

Practicing solo coding for an hour a day often ends up being mechanical and not very useful. This might actually be more helpful.

I don't remember if I read this advice or just intuited it myself (perhaps after some hard lessons), but it's a programming habit I've kept for as long as I can remember (I started coding in the 90s). If I feel rushed, e.g. someone looking over my shoulder, and I copy+paste something, it always leaves me with a sense of unease. It creates a memory & comprehension hole that sticks out like a sore thumb, even for seemingly simple snippets. You can't really be sure it's simple without stepping through it carefully, and simple can be deceptive because it's usually the interactions and assumptions wrt surrounding code that lead to surprises. Typing out code manually gives you time and space to consider the broader picture.

Typing itself is irrelevant, it is the timing spent, even if only seconds, pondering at what each word or syntactic element is and why use it.

Being slower does not automatically make you learn better, focus on the learning is what makes the difference.

If you don't have the opportunity to learn, the time to actually think, then a faster tool is not helping.

TL;DR: what matters is why you are doing something, is it solely to get the task done or is it primary to learn, or both?

The article is not wrong though that it pays off to have some imagination on how to use the models. For example, I want to use SIMD instructions in an ESP32-P4 CPU. Those instructions are undocumented for the most part, with just a couple of handwavey blog posts and some infuriatingly vague marketing material. So I just asked an LLM to create a `SIMD_P4.md` document with all the details. Lo and behold, it practically reverse-engineered the ISA. Now I can program in assembler by hand all I want and build that skill in my own brain, and whenever I find a slightly unclear op in the document, I ask the LLM to refine the documentation in that op.

Remember that the quality of the LLMs code in the areas you don’t know is as good as the quality as the area you do know. You’re only able to gauge the quality of what you do know.