cuddlyogre
· Level 7
random
Why do I feel guilty that I'm not miserable using an LLM to implement all of the little pet projects I either didn't have the knowhow or time to do myself? I just feel terribly conflicted for some reason.
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What can i say, before AI i never made smth that looked nice. I literally cant design. I let AI do that completely. But i did not make a JIT interpreter of my interpreter because i don`t know how to implemnet that in C.
But also, this project is so consistent for its size, i wod not be able to do tat myself eiter.
So yea, i nderstand feeling guilty about it.. But it is wat it is.
You feel guilty that .. you don't feel guilty? .. It's probably a lack of ownership, especially if you just write specs and don't really look at the output (like with OpenCode).
I've written about this before: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/experimenting-with-lazy-spec-driven-development/#the-code
It's nice to get some old projects done, but it feels like I'm using someone else's github project, or I paid a contractor for it.
Recently I started setting up a SSH-CA infrastructure for my local machines and homelab. Something that is so security critical, I didn't want to leave up to some machines. I used some chatbots for diagnosis at some steps, but putting everything together the old fashion way using tutorials made me better understand exactly how everything hooked together; which is really important from a security perspective.
The lack of a sense of ownership is definitely part of it. Something that I would have previously been working on for months is now in a mostly working state after a few days. And I don't really have an intimate understanding of most of it.
I don't exactly miss the stress of continuously finding bugs and having to fix them, but that loss of figuring it out is real. But, the alternative is that those projects would have very likely never been completed at all, so it wouldn't have mattered what I felt about them.
I think I also kind of feel bad that I'm having fun seeing what is possible and I'm getting everything I want for basically no sacrifice.
It's truly a conflicting set of emotions.
That all makes a lot of sense and I totally get a lot of the same feelings myself.
There was an issue at work with some of our geolocation information not updating. I knew I probably could have pointed Claude at the two code bases and it would likely find the problem, but I investigated myself, found the spot where I knew it should be, and found a conditional that skipped duplication locations in a for loop (so if a truck was scheduled to go to a previous location, that location didn't get geographic information).
I could also tell by the git history who wrote it and how it was likely introduced with an LLM. It took me less than an hour, and I did have the LLM write the new test (although I made sure the original version failed that test myself). But I'm glad I did that investigation myself. I think I learned something.
I am really worried about cognitive decline when it comes to my engineering skills. I think that is going to become a real cost in the coming years and I'm curious how our industry handles it.