This goes further into LLM usage than I prefer to go. I learn so much better when I do the research and make the plan myself that I wouldn’t let an LLM do that part even if I trusted the LLM to do a good job.

I basically don’t outsource stuff to an LLM unless I know roughly what to expect the LLM output to look like and I’m just saving myself a bunch of typing.

“Could you make me a Go module with an API similar to archive/tar.Writer that produces a CPIO archive in the newcx format?” was an example from this project.

Yeah, this is a lot of what I'm doing with LLM code generation these days: I've been there, I've done that, I vaguely know what the right code would look like when I see it. Rather than spend 30-60 minutes refreshing myself to swap the context back into my head, I prompt Claude to generate a thing that I know can be done.

Much of the time, it generates basically what I would have written, but faster. Sometimes, better, because it has no concept of boredom or impatience while it produces exhaustive tests or fixes style problems. I review, test, demand refinements, and tweak a few things myself. By the end, I have a working thing and I've gotten a refresher on things anyway.