- coding without an LLM is also good for your brain
- whose gonna tell it to em?
- dont worry, the long term studies are going to pick this up big time 5 years from now
I thought the purpose of coding was to produce software, but apparently every action I take should be evaluated on how well it achieves arbitrary brain calisthenics.
Coding manually keeps you focused on irrelevant details. I find people that actually like that cognitive style and try to remain in it for as long as possible insanely unproductive. They'll spend years coding up shit that can be replaced in a month. I've seen it happen multiple times now and I'm getting sick of it. Proper problem decomposition and architecture is everything. Think about your problem domain. Code is just bullshit.
I'm dealing all day with developers incapable of thinking about anything else than "queries", "classes", "structs" and "early returns are bad". Semantics, ontologies, interfaces, abstraction boundaries, problem decomposition: ain't got no time for that.
We got structs to initialize, copy constructors to worry about and header definitions in bloody C++ to deal with! Oh look, you forgot to use Yoda-speak in your conditional, also you initialized two variables instead of one in this completely transient, temporary piece of code that is only run once every two months. Let's talk about this all morning! Because code hygiene is so extraordinarily important. You should definitely worry about each and every line of code. I hear it's "good for the brain".
I wonder if an LLM could just turn my hand-written notes into code, and if so, where this’d land on the brain health spectrum.
And the long term studies will show that it’s indeed not good, people will discuss it, and nothing will really change, except that there will be a counter movement, and writing code by hand will become a real craft again.