alt Hacker NewsThe first and most important question to ask here is: are you using a coding agent? A lot of times, people who aren't getting much out of LLM-assisted coding are just asking Claude or GPT for code snippets, and pasting and building them themselves (or, equivalently, they're using LLM-augmented autocomplete in their editor).
Almost everybody doing serious work with LLMs is using an agent, which means that the LLM is authoring files, linting them, compiling them, and iterating when it spots problems.
There's more to using LLMs well than this, but this is the high-order bit.
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It’s because the people doing rote programming with them don’t think they are doing rote programming, they think it’s exceptional.
My sweet spot is Cursor to generate/tweak code, but I do all the execution and debugging iteration myself.
Funny, I would give the absolute opposite advice. In my experience, the use of agents (mainly Cursor) is a sure-fire way to have a really painful experience with LLM-assisted coding. I much prefer to use AI as a pair programmer, that I talk to and sometimes get to write entire files, but I'm always the one doing the driving, and mostly the one writing the code.
If you aren't building up mental models of the problem as you go, you end up in a situation where the LLM gets stuck at the edges of its capability, and you have no idea how even to help it overcome the hurdle. Then you spend hours backtracking through what it's done building up the mental model you need, before you can move on. The process is slower and more frustrating than not using AI in the first place.
I guess the reality is, your luck with AI-assisted coding really comes down to the problem you're working on, and how much of it is prior art the LLM has seen in training.