Comment by kentonv
6 days ago
I've noticed this too.
I remember hearing somewhere that humans have a limited capacity in terms of number of decisions made in a day, and it seems to fit here: If I'm writing the code myself, I have to make several decisions on every line of code, and that's mentally tiring, so I tend to stop and procrastinate frequently.
If an LLM is handling a lot of the details, then I'm just making higher-level decisions, allowing me to make more progress.
Of course this is totally speculation and theories like this tend to be wrong, but it is at least consistent with how I feel.
I have a feeling that it's something that might help today but also something you might pay for later. When you have to maintain or bug fix that same code down the line the fact that you were the one making all those higher-level decisions and thinking through the details gives you an advantage. Just having everything structured and named in ways that make the most sense to you seems like it'd be helpful the next time you have to deal with the code.
While it's often a luxury, I'd much rather work on code I wrote than code somebody else wrote.