Re: How to keep enjoying programming in a world of LLMs

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.

beej71, 1 day ago