If I’m learning for the first time, I think it matters to hand code something. The struggle internalizes critical thinking. How else am I supposed to have “taste”? :)
I don’t know if this becomes prod code, but I often feel the need to create like a Jupyter notebook to create a solution step by step to ensure I understand.
Of course I don’t need to understand most silly things in my codebase. But some things I need to reason about carefully.
Almost anything I write in Python I start in jupyter just so I can roll it around and see how it feels- which determines how I build it out and to some degree, how easy it is to fix issues later on.
With llm-first coding, this experience is lost