> used LLMs primarily to rapidly produce code for domains that I don't have deep experience in

You’re either trusting the LLM or you still have to pay the cost of getting the experience you don’t have. So in either case you’re not going too much faster - the formers cost not being apparent until it’s much more expensive later on.

Edit: assuming you don’t struggle with typing speed, basic syntax, APIs etc. These are not significant cost reductions for experts, though they are for juniors.

Correct. In areas you yourself are a junior engineer, you’ll be more effective with an LLM at tackling that area maybe. It’s also surprisingly effective at executing refactors.

I'm not sure which one of us is ultimately more hung up on titles in this context, but I would push back and say that when someone with 30+ years experience tackling software problems delegates navigating the details of an API to an LLM, that is roughly the most "senior developer" moment of the day.

Conflating experience and instinct with knowing everything isn't just false equivalency, it's backwards.

I really don’t know what I said that was such an emotional trigger for you. All I said is that it’s an accelerant for you when you leave your domain. Like for example I’m a systems engineer. I hate coding UIs but with the LLM I can pump out a UI quickly and this was true both for web code and a GUI I built with dioxus. The UI code was also cleaner because I had some sense of how it should be structured and asked the AI to cleanup that structure. But ultimately it did most of the work in response to high level prompts and I picked and chose what to review line by line vs vibe coding.

That’s what I mean - by myself it would have taken me easily 10x longer if not worse because UI coding for me is a slog + there’s nuances about reactive coding + getting started is also a hurdle. The output of the code was still high quality because I knew when the LLM wasn’t making the choices I wanted it to make.

I can tell you exactly: it's your framing of relying on an LLM (or any outside assistance, including humans) as temporarily becoming "junior".

I feel strongly that delegation to strengths is one of the most obvious signs of experience.

Apologies for getting hung up on what might seem like trivial details, but when discussing on a text forum, word choices matter.

An experienced UI developer probably would have still been faster than I. That puts me closer into the junior camp (eg I wouldn’t really know where to start and just start by stumbling around) when I’m by myself but an LLM lets me get back closer to my level of expertise and velocity.

We might just have to agree to disagree. I believe that an experienced developer brings instincts and stacked skills even to domains where they have never touched.

In other words, I don't think that you temporarily regress to "junior" just because you're working on something new. You still have a profound fundamental understanding of how technology works and what to expect in different situations.

This reminds me of the classic "what happens when you type google.com into a web browser" question, with its nearly infinite layers of abstraction from keyboard switches to rendering a document with calls to a display driver and photons hitting your visual receptors.

We might just be quibbling over terminology, however.

> If you don't want to use LLMs, nobody is forcing you. Burning energy trying to convince people to whom the benefits of LLMs are self-evident many times over that they are imagining things is insulting the intelligence of everyone in the conversation.

Hey man, I don't bother trying to convince them because it's just going to increase my job security.

Refusing to use LLMs or thinking they're bad is just FUD and it's the same as people that prefer to use nano/vim over an IDE or it's the same as people that say "hur dur cloud is just somebody else's computer"

It's best to ignore and just leave them in the dust.