>The value I've personally been getting which I've been valuing is that it improves my productivity in the specific areas where it's average quality of response as one shot output is better than what I would do myself because it is equivalent to me Googling an answer, reading 2 to 20 posts, consolidating that information together and synthesising an output

>And that's not to say that the output is good, that's to say that the cost of trying things as a result is much cheaper

But there's a hidden cost here -- by not doing the reading and reasoning out the result, you have learned nothing and your value has not increased. Perhaps you extended a bit less energy producing this output, but you've taken one more step down the road to atrophy.

Seeing the code that the LLM generates and occasionally asking it to explain has been an effective way to improve my understanding. It's better in some ways than reading documentation or doing tutorials because I'm working on a practical project I'm highly motivated by.

I agree that there is benefit in doing research and reasoning, but in my experience skill acquisition through supervising an LLM has been more efficient because my learning is more focused. The LLM is a weird meld of domain expert/sycophant/scatterbrain but the explanations it gives about the code that it generates are quite educational.

I think there's a potential unstated assumption here, though forgive me if it was made explicit elsewhere and/or I missed it.

LLM-assisted can be with or without code review. The original meaning of "vibe coding" was without, and I absolutely totally agree this rapidly leads to a massive pile of technical debt, having tried this with some left-over credit on a free trial specifically to see what the result would be. Sure, it works, but it's a hell of a mess that will make future development fragile (unless the LLMs improve much faster than I'm expecting) for no good reason.

Before doing that, I used Claude Code the other way, with me doing code reviews to make sure it was still aligned with my ideas of best practices. I'm not going to claim it was perfect, because it did a python backend and web front end for a webcam in one case and simultaneously on a second project a browser-based game engine and example game for that engine and on a third simultaneous project a joke programming language, and I'm not a "real" python dev or "real" web dev or any kind of compiler engineer (last time I touched Yacc before this joke language was 20 years earlier at university). But it produced code I was satisfied I could follow, understand, wasn't terrible, had tests.

I wouldn't let a junior commit blindly without code review and tests because I know what junior code looks like from all the times I've worked with juniors (or gone back to 20 year old projects of my own), but even if I was happy to blindly accept a junior's code, or even if the LLM was senior-quality or lead quality, the reason you're giving here means code review before acceptance is helpful for professional development even when all the devs are at the top of their games.

> By not doing the reading and reasoning out the result, you have learned nothing and your value has not increased

AI helps at the margins.

It’s like adding anti-piracy. Some people would simply never have bought the game unless they can pirate it.

There’s a large volume of simple tools, or experimental software that I would simply never had the time to build the traditional way.

I mean you're not wrong

I suppose the way I approach this is, I use libraries which solve problems that I have, that in principle understand, because I know and understand the theory, but in practice I don't know the specific details, because I've not implemented the solution myself

And honestly, it's not my job to solve everything, I've just got to build something useful or that serves my goals

I basically put LLM's into that category, I'm not much of a NIH kinda person, I'm happy to use libraries, including alpha ones on projects if they've been vetted over the range of inputs that I care about, and I'm not going to go into how to do that here, because honestly it's not that exciting, but there's very standard boring ways to produce good guarantees about it's behaviour, so as long as I've done that, I'm pretty happy

So I suppose what I'm saying is that isn't a hidden cost to me, it's a pragmatic decision I made that I was happy with the trade off :)

When I want to learn, and believe me I do now and again, I'll focus on that there :)