I completely agree. I let LLMs write a ton of my code, but I do my own writing.

It's actually kind of a weird "of two minds" thing. Why should I care that my writing is my own, but not my code?

The only explanation I have is that, on some level, the code is not the thing that matters. Users don't care how the code looks, they just care that the product works. Writing, on the other hand, is meant to communicate something directly from me, so it feels like there's something lost if I hand that job over to AI.

I often think of this quote from Ted Chiang's excellent story The Truth Of Fact, The Truth of Feeling:

> As he practiced his writing, Jijingi came to understand what Moseby had meant: writing was not just a way to record what someone said; it could help you decide what you would say before you said it. And words were not just the pieces of speaking; they were the pieces of thinking. When you wrote them down, you could grasp your thoughts like bricks in your hands and push them into different arrangements. Writing let you look at your thoughts in a way you couldn’t if you were just talking, and having seen them, you could improve them, make them stronger and more elaborate.”

But there is obviously some kind of tension in letting an LLM write code for me but not prose - because can't the same quote apply to my code?

I can't decide if there really is a difference in kind between prose and code that justifies letting the LLM write my code, or if I'm just ignoring unresolved cognitive dissonance because automating the coding part of my job is convenient.

To me, you are describing a fluency problem. I don't know you or how fluent you are in code, but what you have described is the case where I have no problem with LLMs: translating from a native language to some other language.

If you are using LLMs to precisely translate a set of requirements into code, I don't really see a problem with that. If you are using LLMs to generate code that "does something" and you don't really understand what you were asking for nor how to evaluate whether the code produced matched what you wanted, then I have a very big problem with that for the same reasons you outline around prose: did you actually mean to say what you eventually said?

Of course something will get lost in any translation, but that's also true of translating your intent from brain to language in the first place, so I think affordances can be made.