>They introduce new layers of complex system understanding and problem solving (at that AI meta-layer), and let me dig into and solve harder and more time-consuming problems than I was able to without them.

This is not my experience at all. My experience is that the moment I stop using them as google or search on steroids and let them generate code, I start losing the grip of what is being built.

As in, when it’s time for a PR, I never feel 100% confident that I’m requesting a review on something solid. I can listen to that voice and sort of review myself before going public, but that usually takes as much time as writing myself and is way less fun, or I can just submit and be dishonest since then I’m dropping that effort into a teammate.

In other words, I feel that the productivity gain only comes if you’re willing to remove yourself from the picture and let others deal with any consequence. I’m not.

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simonw 14 hours ago | parent [-]

Clearly you and I are having different experiences here.

Maybe a factor here is that I've invested a huge amount of effort over the last ~10 years in getting better at reading code?

I used to hate reading code. Then I found myself spending more time in corporate life reviewing code then writing it myself... and then I realized the huge unlock I could get from using GitHub search to find examples of the things I wanted to do, I'd only I could overcome my aversion to reading the resulting search results!

When LLMs came along they fit my style of working much better than they would have earlier in my career.

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kace91 12 hours ago | parent [-]

I mean, I wouldn’t say that’s a personal limitation. I read and review code on the daily and have done so for years.

The point is exactly that, that ai feels like reviewing other people’s code, only worse because bad ai written code mimics good code in a way that bad human code doesn’t, and because you don’t get the human factor of mentoring someone when you see they lack a skill.

If I wanted to do that for a living it’s always been an option, being the “architect” overseeing a group of outsourced devs for example. But I stay as individual contributor for doing quite different work.

	▲	simonw 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> The point is exactly that, that ai feels like reviewing other people’s code, only worse because bad ai written code mimics good code in a way that bad human code doesn’t, and because you don’t get the human factor of mentoring someone when you see they lack a skill. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. I've certainly felt the "mimics good code" thing in the past. It's been less of a problem for me recently, maybe because I've started forcing Claude Code into a red/green TDD cycle for almost everything which makes it much less likely to write code that it hasn't at least executed via the tests. The mentoring thing is really interesting - it's clearly the biggest difference between working with a coding agent and coaching a human collaborator. I've managed to get a weird simulacrum of that by telling the coding agents to take notes as they work - I even tried "add to a til.md document of things you learned" on a recent project - and then condensing those lessons into an AGENTS.md later on.