I'm gonna disagree, but before I do: love this story, thanks for typing it up.

I guess my point is: tools are like this. A moldboard plow was better than a straight plow, and therefore...what, people became addicted to them? I'm addicted to grocery stores and dollars as a means to acquire the food I need to survive? Hey, even your hand nailing pushed out the mortise-and-tenon people! Talk about sacrificing craft for convenience...

I don't think "addiction" is the right word to try and describe what's going on there.

Any new tech that ends up "winning" (being adopted by the masses) is going to do so because it becomes indispensable, and when it wins it usually displaces some sort of craft that required skills that were cultivated through struggle, and will be missed by those who have those skills and are no longer differentiated by them.

Thinking out loud: when is the description of "addiction" more accurate? It's when the thing is a vice: it doesn't provide enough value to justify its costs. We tolerate caffeine addictions because caffeine is cheap, doesn't have a ton of health drawbacks, stuff like coffee and pop taste good, and we get productivity gains. Cigarettes are less tolerated because the health drawbacks are more pronounced and the smoke gets everywhere. Social media gets called an addiction because people see the hours lost to doomscrolling as worse than the human connections that are made. And so on.

So, back to LLMs, I guess the question is more about how the thing is being used! I wouldn't apologize for feeling addicted to a machine that writes my unit tests for me; but I'd feel bad if I started having an emotional affair with one...

There's lots of very healthy addictions. There are also lots of very unhealthy addictions. Dental hygiene addiction? Good -- if kept in check (it can go too far). Heroin addiction? Bad -- always bad!

These things are all included under the addiction umbrella.

I was addicted to using that air nailer. The boss might tell me to use my hammer instead when it was out of service and to just get the work done, but when that happened I'd start fixing it anyway as soon as he wasn't looking... like a drug addict who is working towards getting his next hit at every opportunity.

I'm not compelled to feel bad about having been addicted to using that tool. I did a lot of good work with it. It was a good addiction to have. I fed this addiction 5 days a week for years.

Anyway, yes: LLMs. I use the shit out of LLM tools. I understand what they are, and what they are not -- I'm not psychotic in this way at all. I spend a lot of time correcting their errors so whatever I'm working on can move forward.

And after several decades of trying, LLMs allow me to finally accept that I'm just terrible at writing code. I used to feel inferior about this. Every little project would get completely hung up on something that many, many other folks would have no trouble overcoming.

Like: Somewhere in a box in my basement I even have the original TI MSP430 LaunchPad kit that I bought at launch 16 years ago with focused intention to get a very specific thing done with it. I never got it done. As time moved on, I bought ESP dev boards and Pi Picos hoping that things would finally let me finish my one simple little project, but I always got hung up whether in C or C++ or uPython or whatever. Different IDEs, no IDEs, different build processes, whatever. The process always stalled and died. Every. Single. Time.

Again, I suck at code. Being able to finally accept this has been richly rewarding.

With an ESP32 board, Codex, a clear vision of what I wanted, and a fragile dysfunctional draft written in uPython that didn't come close to actually working (despite years of effort), I got that thing working properly and cleanly in one single evening -- in C++.

16 years of effort resolved all at once, just like that. With guidance, the bot even wrote its own tests that worked with real-world feedback from the hardware the ESP32 was driving.

That all felt great. It was a tremendous relief.

I spent part of another evening making it fancy with a web interface for tuning and monitoring. I transferred the circuit over to perfboard and installed it in the place I've wanted it for 16 years. It's now a completely functional prototype. I want to rejigger it a bit with a custom PCB and a different MCU, but with LLMs I find that all very practical and approachable without fear.

This tool lets me work with things that I am otherwise incapable of working with. It lets me do things I was always ultimately incapable of doing.

Am I addicted to it? Yes. I'm completely finished with trying to write code the old-fashioned way, and LLMs make me feel good about finally accomplishing some good stuff. Like the air nailer in construction, I use LLMs compulsively in these tasks.

For programming, the bot is the first thing I reach for; in fact, it's the only thing I reach for.

If the bot is unreachable today and I have programming to do, then I seek to restore my use of the the bot just like I sought to fix the air nailer back when I had nailing to do.

And like any other addict of any other thing: I don't care if this causes harm to me, or to others, or the world itself. Maybe it's turning a part of my brain into mush; I don't care (the coding part was apparently mush to begin with). I enjoy using it enough that I'm just going to keep doing it no matter what. I've got more programming to do now than I ever have before, and so my use is accelerating: This is the feedback cycle typical of addiction.

I'm not sorry about any of that at all.