alt Hacker News>They introduce new layers of complex system understanding and problem solving (at that AI meta-layer), and let me dig into and solve harder and more time-consuming problems than I was able to without them.
This is not my experience at all. My experience is that the moment I stop using them as google or search on steroids and let them generate code, I start losing the grip of what is being built.
As in, when it’s time for a PR, I never feel 100% confident that I’m requesting a review on something solid. I can listen to that voice and sort of review myself before going public, but that usually takes as much time as writing myself and is way less fun, or I can just submit and be dishonest since then I’m dropping that effort into a teammate.
In other words, I feel that the productivity gain only comes if you’re willing to remove yourself from the picture and let others deal with any consequence. I’m not.
Clearly you and I are having different experiences here.
Maybe a factor here is that I've invested a huge amount of effort over the last ~10 years in getting better at reading code?
I used to hate reading code. Then I found myself spending more time in corporate life reviewing code then writing it myself... and then I realized the huge unlock I could get from using GitHub search to find examples of the things I wanted to do, I'd only I could overcome my aversion to reading the resulting search results!
When LLMs came along they fit my style of working much better than they would have earlier in my career.