I can feel the skill atrophy creeping in. My very first instinct is go use the LLM. I think much like forcing yourself to exercise, eat right, and avoid social media / distractions, this will be a new modern skillset; do you have the discipline to avoid becoming useless without an LLM? A small few will be great at this, the middle of the bell curve will do "well enough," and you know the story for the rest.

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andy99 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I’ve been using LLMs to code for some time and I look at it differently.

I ask myself if I need to understand the code, and if the answer is yes I don’t use an LLM. It’s not a matter of discipline, it’s a sober view of what the minimal amount of work for me is.

	▲	layer8 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The only time one doesn’t need to understand the code is when it doesn’t matter if the code is correct, or when it can be tested exhaustively for all possible inputs. Both are pretty rare for me.

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vips7L 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This just sounds like addiction to the dopamine of instant gratification.

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delaminator 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I haven't written any code in 6 months. But I can still remember how to code in 6502 machine code from the 1980s.

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zeroonetwothree 9 hours ago | parent [-]

How can you be sure you remember if you aren’t actually doing it?

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kaffekaka 6 hours ago | parent [-]

This is an important question I think. Gradually losing a skill to atrophy is not something you notice consciously.

	▲	delaminator 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Come on, I've been coding for 45 years. I don't forget so quickly.