Same feeling as pair programming in my experience.

If your consciousness is driving, your brain is internally aligned. You type as you think. You can get flow state, or at least find a way to think around a problem.

If you're working with someone else and having to discuss everything as you go, then it's just a different activity. I've collaboratively written better code this way in the past. But it's slower and more exhausting.

Like pair programming, I hope people realise that there's a place for both, and doing exclusively one or the other full time isn't in everyone's best interests.

> I find LLMs so much more exhausting than manual coding

I do as well, so totally know what you're talking about. There's part of me that thinks it will become less exhausting with time and practice.

In high school and college I worked at this Italian place that did dine in, togo, and delivery orders. I got hired as a delivery driver and loved it. A couple years in there was a spell where they had really high turnover so the owners asked me to be a waiter for a little while. The first couple months I found the small talk and the need to always be "on" absolutely exhausting, but overtime I found my routine and it became less exhausting. I definitely loved being a delivery driver far more, but eventually I did hit a point where I didn't feel completely drained after every shift of waiting tables.

I can't help but think coding with LLMs will follow a similar pattern. I don't think I'll ever like it more than writing the code myself, but I have to believe at some point I'll have done it enough that it doesn't feel completely draining.

I think the upper limit is your ability to decide what to build among infinite possibilities. How should it work, what should it be like to use it, what makes the most sense, etc.

The code part is trivial and a waste of time in some ways compared to time spent making decisions about what to build. And sometimes even a procrastination to avoid thinking about what to build, like how people who polish their game engine (easy) to avoid putting in the work to plan a fun game (hard).

The more clarity you have about what you’re building, then the larger blocks of work you can delegate / outsource.

So I think one overwhelming part of LLMs is that you don’t get the downtime of working on implementation since that’s now trivial; you are stuck doing the hard part of steering and planning. But that’s also a good thing.

If you care at code quality of course it is exhausting. It's supposed to be. Now there is more code for you to assure quality in the same length of time.

I suspect it's because you need to keep more things in your head yourself; after a while of coding by hand, it becomes more labor and doesn't cost as much brain power anymore. But when offloading the majority of that coding to an LLM, you're left with the higher level tasks of software engineering, you don't get the "breaks" while writing code anymore.

Classic coding was the process of incrementally saying "Ah, I'm getting it!" -- as your compile your code and it works better each time, you get a little dopamine hit from "solving" the puzzle. This creates states where time can pass with great alacrity as we enter these little dopamine induced trances we call "flow", which we all experience.

AI is not that, it's a casino. Every time you put words into the prompt you're left with a cortisol spike as you hope the LLM lottery gives you a good answer. You get a little dopamine spike when it does, but it's not the same as when you do it yourself because it's punctuated by anxiety, which is addictive but draining. And I personally have never gotten into a state of LLM-induced "flow", but maybe others have and can explain that experience. But to me there's too much anxiety around the LLM from the randomness of what it produces.

Working with LLMs for coding tasks feels more like juggling I think. You're fixating on the positions of all of the jobs you're handling simultaneously and while muscle memory (in this metaphor, the LLMs) are keeping each individual item in the air, you're actively managing, considering your next trick/move, getting things back on track when one object drifts from what you'd anticipated, etc. It simultaneously feels markedly more productive and requiring carefully divided (and mentally taxing) focus. It's an adjustment, though I do worry if there's a real tangible trade-off at play and I'm loosing my edge for instances where I need to do something carefully, meticulously and manually.

Theory of Bounded Rationality applies. Tech tools scale systemic capability limits. 3 inch chimp brain limits dont change. The story writes itself.

It feels no different than inhheriting someone's code base when you start at a company. I hate this feeling. AI removes the developer's attachment and first hand understanding of the code.

I go through phases with it where I am extraordinarily productive and times where i can't even bear to open a terminal window.

You used to be a Formula 1 driver. Now you are an instructor for a Formula 1 autopilot. You have to watch it at all times with full attention for it's a fast and reckless driver.

I imagine code reviewing is a very different sort of skill than coding. When you vibe code (assuming you're reading teh code that is written for you) you become a coder reviewer... I suspect you're learning a new skill.