I and my friends go back and forth, every day, on whether coding with LLMs is a net plus or a net negative.

I'm at the point where I think it's dumb to not do it but also dumb to do it. I have no real answer.

I have settled on using LLMs for everything but to spend more time honing the quality and cleanliness with LLM passes afterwards than I generally would have taken to write it well myself in the first place. This is in some ways the worst of both worlds, but it somehow lets me bypass akrasia while still getting pretty good code out, so I consider it superior to how I worked before. I get more done in three months even if I get less done in a day.

I am with you here but don't get overly pessimistic: devising hooks and stopgaps and flows and constantly tuning what to watch out for does not only improve the quality of the LLM-output code. It hones and refines your own abilities.

CC has made some pretty dumb stuff in my projects but I don't resent those occurrences. They taught me (more accurately: reminded me, because I already knew but was not applying that knowledge too often) very valuable lessons on code quality -- that's still a dark area to this day and every ray of light on it is valuable for the future programming.

To me programming with LLMs made me a better programmer. But yes, I don't just rubber-stamp PRs.

It also finally allowed me to be less of a code monkey and more of an architect and a backend lead than before. Which I was really missing.