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xpct • yesterday at 11:31 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

I agree.. partly, and my problem is with enjoyment. I did some hand coding today and immediately got in the zone, something I'm still not able to do with LLMs. It most definitely took me probably ~2x longer than it would with an LLM, but it was much more enjoyable owning every decision behind the process, and having a full view of how the system worked.

I think this could be achievable with LLMs if they had a much higher token rate. That way you'd have less downtime and could work on the problem more aggressively. How it's designed to work now, offloading cognitively, doesn't feel very good, even when you 'ship' more.


Replies

linsomniac • today at 12:45 AM

>my problem is with enjoyment

I get it, I've gotten a lot of joy over the decades from the specific act of programming. But I also get a lot of joy from making something. I'm old enough now that I don't have a lot of my time left to "hand stitch an amazing tapestry". But with AI tooling, I do have time to try out a bunch of ideas and see how they work, scratch little itches and also just run a mad scientist library of experiments, without each experiment taking tens or hundreds of hours of coding to see how that experiment pans out.

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vigilantpuma • today at 12:15 AM

Yeah, I can never get in the zone with LLMs either. It’s like operating in constant interruption mode. And I always thought I was good at multitasking (even though I know formally it’s an illusion)