I've heard people say that these coding agents are just tools and don't replace the thinking. That's fine but the problem for me is that the act of coding is when I do my thinking!

I'm thinking about how to solve the problem and how to express it in the programming language such that it is easy to maintain. Getting someone/something else to do that doesn't help me.

But different strokes for different folks, I suppose.

I'm similar, but I do find some natural places where LLMs can be helpful.

Just today I was working on something that involves a decent amount of configuration. It's in Python unfortunately and I hate passing around dictionaries for configs, I usually like to parse the JSON or YAML or whatever into a config class so I have a natural way to validate and access without just throwing strings around.

As I was playing with the code for the actual work that needs to be done, I was thinking what configs I needed and what structure made sense. Once I knew what I needed I gave the JSON to an LLM with some instructions regarding helper functions and told it to give me the appropriate Python code. It's just a bunch of dataclasses with some from_dict or from_string methods on them, not interesting or difficult to write. Freed me up to keep working on the real problem.