> That he says LLMs make him more productive at all as a hands-on developer, especially around first drafts on a new idea, means a lot to me personally.
There is likely to be a great rift in how very talented people look at sharper tools.
I've seen the same division pop up with CNC machines, 3d printers, IDEs and now LLMs.
If you are good at doing something, you might find the new tool's output to be sub-par over what you can achieve yourself, but often the lower quality output comes much faster than you can generate.
That causes the people who are deliberate & precise about their process to hate the new tool completely - expressing in the actual code (or paint, or marks on wood) is much better than trying to explain it in a less precise language in the middle of it. The only exception I've seen is that engineering folks often use a blueprint & refine it on paper.
There's a double translation overhead which is wasteful if you don't need it.
If you have dealt with a new hire while being the senior of the pair, there's that familiar feeling of wanting to grab their keyboard instead of explaining how to build that regex - being able to do more things than you can explain or just having a higher bandwidth pipe into the actual task is a common sign of mastery.
The incrementalists on the other hand, tend to love the new tool as they tend to build 6 different things before picking what works the best, slowly iterating towards what they had in mind in the first place.
I got into this profession simply because I could Ctrl-Z to the previous step much more easily than my then favourite chemical engineering goals. In Chemistry, if you get a step wrong, you go to the start & start over. Plus even when things work, yield is just a pain there (prove it first, then you scale up ingredients etc).
Just from the name of sketch.dev, it appears that this author is of the 'sketch first & refine' model where the new tool just speeds up that loop of infinite refinement.