these days, it's incredibly common to do as little as possible yourself. there's an abundance of libraries, searchable public code repositories, and, of course, LLMs.
i don't do a ton of manual code writing right now. this isn't because i don't enjoy coding. i do. in fact, if there were no deadlines or time constraints, i would hand write all of the code myself. i'd use LLMs to answer my questions of course, but i genuinely enjoy the process of writing, debugging, and optimizing code.
the issue is that there are almost always time constraints in any "real-world" scenario. using tools like dingllm(nvim btw) and claude code is just faster. usually.
if i know how to do something, every part of it, then it's faster to do it myself (aside from mundane tasks). but when im working on new things, like landing pages with transparent lighting effects and fancy scrolling animations with background gradients, it's much faster to use the all-knowing coding god that is claude 4 opus.
sure it makes mistakes. lots of them. but for me to understand these things to the extent necessary to implement them WELL in production, it'd take at least a day of playing around with the code, and probably another two days to get it done. at least.
with claude, i don't fully understand every bit of the code. but i'm able to implement it at least 30% faster. while multitasking. not ideal, but in a world where there are business requirements and deadlines that need to be met, i must use the tools available to meet these constraints.
doing things yourself is incredibly useful, and doubly satisfying. using LLMs to code feels like paying someone to do work for you and taking credit for it. at least, that's how i feel if i dont understand every little bit of it.
similar to how it feels to use libraries without understanding how they work. it's a black box, but it's a lot faster.
i look forward to arranging my schedule in such a way that there are few time constraints. i'd love to have the time to meander around the code gardens and tend to every piece myself. it's how it used to be.
if you're doing a project with no time constraints, i urge you to not let LLM write the code for you. ask it questions, sure. but type out every character yourself.
maybe i'm just romanticizing the past. but it's worth exploring programming in this way, at least in my opinion.