I dont really understand how this is possible. I've built some very large applications, and even a full LLM data curation,tokenizer, pretrain, posttrain SFT/DPO pipeline with LLM's and it most certainly took far less time than if i had done it manually. Sure it isnt all optimal...but it most certainly isnt subpar, and it is fully functional

That is what's hard about transitioning from coder to lead. A good coder makes full use of a single thread of execution. A good lead effectively handles the coordination of multiple threads. Different skills.

An LLM coding assistant today is an erratic junior team member, but its destructive potential is nowhere near some of the junior human engineers I've worked with. So it's worth building the skills and processes to work with them productively. Today, Claude is a singular thing. In six months or a year, it'll be ten or a hundred threads working concurrently on dozens of parts of your project. Either you'll be comfortable coordinating them, or you'll nope out of there and remain an effective but solitary human coder.

Then you are using it the wrong way

Driving is a skill that needs to be learnt, same with working with agents.

Are you giving it huge todos in one prompt or working modularly?

Claude set up account creation / login with SSO login, OTP and email notifications in like 5 mins and told me exactly what to do on the provider side. Theres no way that wouldn't have taken me few hours to figure out

There is no way its not faster at a large breadth of the work, unless youre maybe a fanatic with reviewing and nitpicking every line of code to the extreme

> I would have finished the project in the same amount of time

Probably less time, because you understood the details better.

> if I had written it completely by myself from the start, I would have finished the project in the same amount of time but I’d understand the details far better.

I believe the argument from the other camp is that you don't need to understand the code anymore, just like you don't need to understand the assembly language.

Have you added agents.md files?

You have to do more than prompts to get the more impressive results

skill issue.

sorry for being blunt, but if you have tried once, twice and came to this conclusion, it is definitely a skill issue, I never got comfortable by writing 3 lines of Java, Python or Go or any other language, it took me hundreds of hours spent doing non-sense, failing miserably and finding out that I was building things which already exists in std lib.