My experience on r/programming came as a surprise to me. I know that not everyone in the community is sold on LLM based coding, and I was fully prepared for some pushback. But I was not prepared for the outright hostility and vitriol just for recounting my actual experience with LLM coding as a practitioner. I wrote up the post since it needed to be longer than a reddit comment and I was not feeling the need to engage with that level of negativity in the comments anyway.

Results can't lie. I'm getting more done now than I ever have, and I'm not even getting the LLMs to generate any code (actually I explicitly tell it "do not generate any code"). For me LLMs are a tool to help break out of analysis-paralysis. "Give me the full list of things in this category" is my main use-case, but I also do some "what am I missing here", "what might this word mean" (I like making up new words), and "what does this error message mean".

I'm not the best coder, I'm an extreme generalist. I've spent 15 years being a novice barely being able to stand up a basic network at home, barely being able to write Bash. Suddenly I have a whole ass enterprise network in my bedroom, and I'm coding REAL programs (e.g. crypto trading bot based on neuroevolution, or my "shuffle shows but keep the episodes in order" program).

You know that thing where you're stuck up a brick wall, and you post a forum question or a reddit post, and you get absolutely nothing from it? No answers, not even a shitty response to make you feel dumb. Nothing. LLMs have eliminated that situation for me, and I think it's the biggest thing. I've wasted YEARS being stuck on something just because I don't know the perfect way to ask and the forum people are extremely rude and pedantic. As a result of eliminating this problem I've done about 5 years worth of work in just a few months.