Everyone else is using LLMs to assist their development, which makes it a lot harder to work without them, especially in just building enterprise apps. It doesn't feel like I'm creating something anymore. Rather, it feels like a fuzzy amalgamation of all developers in the training data are. Working with LLMs sometimes feels like information overload. When I see so much code scrolling past as the agent makes its changes, this can be exhausting. Reading this massive volume of code is exhausting. I don't like that the new "power tools" of software engineering mean that my career, our career, is now monetizable. I liked feeling like a craftsman, and that is lost.
I’m curious if you’ve tried using these tools the other way.
Whenever I’ve done experimenting I found the tab completion annoying and the agent got so much wrong I was basically fighting it at every step, but when I went back to VS Code and treated LM as a super fast inline stackoverflow—give me an example, look up this API, find my dumb syntax error—I could use it to support deep work/staying in the zone rather than supplant it, and the resulting code isn’t slop because I wrote it.
It seems to me a lot of developers are operating this way instead, treating the machine as an electric bicycle for lots of little boosts rather than FSD.
I have, and it's entirely my own fault, but the way my brain works is I can't justify doing something slower than I possibly could with other tools. I'm not one to completely give in to vibe coding. I do still very manually drive the LLM when I work, but I don't even feel like learning tech anymore.
I can't help but ask myself, what's the point when learning another programming language, or another library, or another paradigm, when a lot of this information and knowledge is encoded in the model weights of the LLM
No the OP, but I feel like using LLMs to code is much more like management than coding. And the "person" you're managing is a not very smart coder with severe memory issues.
My guess is because it’s turning development into a Red Queen’s Race [0] where everyone has to run faster and faster just to stay in the same place. If everyone else is using LLMs, how can you stay competitive without using them?
