Tangent and admittedly off-topic but I've come to see LLM-assisted coding as a kind of teleportation.

With LLMs, you glimpse a distant mountain. In the next instant, you're standing on its summit. Blink, and you are halfway down a ridge you never climbed. A moment later, you're flung onto another peak with no trail behind you, no sense of direction, no memory of the ascent. The landscape keeps shifting beneath your feet, but you never quite see the panorama. Before you know it, you're back near the base, disoriented, as if the journey never happened. But confident, you say you were on the top of the mountain.

Manual coding feels entirely different. You spot the mountain, you study its slopes, trace a route, pack your gear. You begin the climb. Each step is earned steadily and deliberately. You feel the strain, adjust your path, learn the terrain. And when you finally reach the summit, the view unfolds with meaning. You know exactly where you are, because you've crossed every meter to get there. The satisfaction isn't just in arriving, nor in saying you were there: it is in having truly climbed.