Lol this person talks about easing into LLMs again two weeks after quitting cold turkey. The addiction is real. I laugh because I’m in the same situation, and see no way out other than to switch professions and/or take up programming as a hobby in which I purposefully subject myself to hard mode. I’m too productive with it in my profession to scale back and do things by hand — the cat is out of the bag and I’ve set a race pace at work that I can’t reasonably retract from without raising eyebrows. So I agree with the author’s referenced post that finding ways to still utilize it while maintaining a mental map of the code base and limiting its blast radius is a good middle ground, but damn it requires a lot of discipline.
In my defense, I wrote the blog post about quitting a good while after I've already quit cold turkey -- but you're spot on. :)
Especially when surrounded by people who swear LLMs can really be gamechanging on certain tasks, it's really hard to just keep doing things by hand (especially if you have the gut feeling that an LLM can probably do rote pretty well, based on past experience).
What kind of works for me now is what a colleague of mine calls "letting it write the leaf nodes in the code tree". So long as you take on the architecture, high level planning, schemas, and all the important bits that require thinking - chances are it can execute writing code successfully by following your idiot-proof blueprint. It's still a lot of toll and tedium, but perhaps still beats mechanical labor.
It started as a mix of self-imposed pressure and actually enjoying marking tasks as complete. Now I feel resistant to relaxing things. And no, I definitely don’t get paid more.
cat out of the bag is disautomation. the speed in the timetable is an illusion if the supervision requires blast radius retention. this is more like an early video game assembly line than a structured skilled industry
