Not so long ago I read something on HN which resonated with me: we’re moving into the era that is comparable to car mechanics enthusiasts. You have a previous generation of cars where people just enjoy working on with hand tools, and there’s modern cars where people like to tune with software patches.

From the very start of llms I’ve had nothing but bad experiences with code that was generated for me. Either it’s buggy, it works but I end up losing an evening on some obscure bug, or it’s full of red flags.

My latest hobby project is just in a text editor with markup and that’s it. I’m also done with the augmented assistance in the IDE. I google things I forgot. I constantly read these amazing stories of people vibe-coding some firmware/driver that just works, and honestly I’m starting to question whether I’m reading the posts of some promotional bot.

One thing to keep in mind is that anytime you punt to the LLM (or anybody) for anything, that skill is going to atrophy.

I've seen this happen to myself where suddenly I had trouble planning out the architecture for a very small project. It should have been obvious to me, and I knew that. So it was disconcerting to not be able to suddenly have the answer appear in front of me like it normally would. I thought maybe I would go to Claude and help get some ideas.

But then I stopped myself. I knew I should be able to do this! So I got out a piece of paper and I scribbled ideas until the dam burst and suddenly the entire design was obvious, like it should have been in the first place. It took about 5 minutes.

But those were an alarming 5 minutes. It was like I'd gone blind to the solution.

And I realized that when I asked Claude for a bunch of ideas and then I selected the best one based on my experience, I was exercising that exact skill. I wasn't exercising the skill of coming up with the solution from scratch.

Lots of times we're happy letting particular skills atrophy. Maybe we don't like exercising them and we just don't want to do that anymore. And I think that's valid.

Just be careful how you use it.

My jobs made me hate programming long before LLMs. If anything I enjoy programming more now that I can tell the LLM to do the bullshit I don’t want to do, saving my energy for interesting problems…usually ones found outside of my 9-5.

I miss having a canvas. I miss having a place where I created something that is a reflection of my understanding.

The code used to be my canvas. But I suppose it never was an ideal canvas, because the code's primary purpose is to achieve a business objective, or make something work.

I want a really polished literate programming environment where I can slice up the code and add drawings and annotations, and it is all automatically kept in sync with the actual code. I could use this to record my own understanding. Teams could use this to collaborate and create documentation.

The code still matters, but the time for human hand crafted code seems to have ended. Humans still want and need to craft something though. We need to create something to solidify and record our understanding.

Humans need a place to write as a tool for thought, and if the code is no longer that place, we need something else--and if done well it can be better than the actual code.

And it has to not fucking suck--I'm not talking about Jira and Confluence here--good Lord, I know if I present this idea to a project manager they're just going to tell me to use Confluence.

And, again, I'm not talking about just a really great note taking app here. It needs to be interleaved with the code and kept in sync with the code.

I recently (2 days ago) noticed i enjoy it a lot more if i use a super fast model with low reasoning (gpt 6 luna low effort + fast mode). That way, i can still have hands on the entire time and dont have to wait around for 20minutes for it to finish up and have made a bunch of decisions without me.

Also, LLMs are first and foremost excellent at reading ultra fast. Makes it excellent for summarizing and re-representing modules of your code

All pros and cons of LLM coding aside, something has really shifted for me with the latest agentic coding. I’ve found my motivation to work slowly slipping away. No matter what role I had I always found something to keep me engaged with the job. Now though there’s no motivation. Every week it feels like my skills, talents, even ideas themselves are less and less relevant. I’m just meat shuffling data and permissions between bots

I've avoided using LLMs. You might not have the option of doing this in paid employment, but you certainly can in your spare time, and if you don't you'll gradually lose the ability to think in a programming language. This applies similarly to any other cognitive skill too: writing music or playing a musical instrument, speaking and reading a foreign language, doing cryptic crosswords, playing chess or go, etc. You wouldn't stop playing chess just because computers are now much better at it. The point is learn, understand, and do those things yourself.

Here's my advice, based on what I have done: implement a programming language yourself, from scratch, without using an LLM, and then program in that. Don't release your implementation, or any code you've written in it.

Most (almost all) of my programming at home has been done in a Lisp dialect I designed and wrote myself, which is superficially similar to Common Lisp, but with subtle differences, including some deficiencies that I have to work around. And in my Lisp dialect, I implemented a visual dataflow language. Code samples are on my web site, but they're PNG images, so are safe from LLMs (I think). The language was designed to run on MIMD hardware, which doesn't exist in the real world. I've also implemented a Prolog which doesn't use Edinburgh syntax, which I use for type checking, and for parsing a controlled English implementation. So the temptation, and also the option, of using an LLM was never there.

In the course of doing all this, I've learned a lot along the way, which I wouldn't have if I'd used an LLM.

I don't mind using an LLM while programming. At least the way I use it, I still feel like my experience, knowledge and taste is being utilized to make it better than if I were to vibe it.

What has made me enjoy it less, is having to deal with colleagues' use of it. Sorry to say, but I don't enjoy talking to meat proxies, or getting huge PRs that solve the wrong problem. It's like half the people have turned off their brain. We produce faster, but we don't produce the right stuff.

While reading "The Nemesis of Creativity"

It uses a Chinese sage to illustrate the fight against using machines:

"I have heard my teacher say that whoever uses machines does all his work like a machine. He who does his work like a machine grows a heart like a machine, and he who carries the heart of a machine in his breast loses his simplicity. He who has lost his simplicity becomes unsure in the strivings of his soul. Uncertainty in the strivings of the soul is something which does not agree with honest sense. It is not that I do not know of such things; I am ashamed to use them."

It resonates with me similarly as the post.

I’ve been experimenting with this idea that I can implement features faster and more accurately than the big model + agent swarm paradigm. I also have been trying this because of what the post brings up when it comes to AI burnout.

For me, writing the code (literally typing), shifting files around, renaming things is slow. So I’ve been using small models + much stronger grasp on the reins. Similar to what this post mentions. It’s been great, the decisions come from me. I tell it to make a domain class with these fields and these invariants. It does it in a split second, I look it over, tweak it and move to the next part of implementation.

When I experimented with swarms it would spend an hour just having agents adversarially review to decide some pretty trivial details. This way, when someone asks me a question during review, I can answer it. When I need to dive back in, I know what to look for and where to look for it. I have way more connection to my work, than a few months prior.