I've stopped using LLMs to write code entirely. Instead, I use Claude and Qwen as "brilliant idiots" for rubber ducking. I never copy and paste code it gives me, I use it to brainstorm and get me unstuck.

I'm more comfortable using it this way.

Having spent nearly 12 hours a day for a year with GPTs I agree that this is the way. Treat it like a professor on office hours who’s sometimes a little apathetically wrong because they’re overworked and underfunded

People should try to switch to a more code-focused interface, like aider.

Copy and pasting code it gives you just means your workflow is totally borked, and it's no wonder you wouldn't want to try to let it generate code, because it's such a pain in your ass to try it, diff it, etc.

The workflow isn’t the problem. The code is.

The code that ChatGPT and Claude will output via their chat interfaces is a night and day difference from what will be output from tools built around their APIs.

You "can" get the web UI to behave similarly but it's both tedious and slow to manually copy and paste all of that into your context during each interaction and the output will be unfriendly towards human interaction to paste it back out to your project. But that's like saying you "can" browse the internet with a series of CURL commands and pasting the output into files you save locally and then viewing them locally from your browser, nobody is advised to do that because it's a painfully bad experience compared to just having your browser fetch a site's files directly and rendering them directly.

Just go check out Aider or Cline's project repos and look at the dramatically different amounts of code, repo and task specific context they can automatically inject for you as part of their interface, or how much different the built in system prompts are from whatever the default web UIs use, or even the response structures and outputs and how those are automatically applied to your work instead. I've never once exhausted my daily API limits just treating their APIs as Chat interface backends (via Open WebUI and other chat options), but I exhausted my Claude API token limits _the very first day_ I tried Cline. The volume of information you can easily provide through tooling is impossible to do in the same timeframe by hand.

I give every AI tool a college try and have since the copilot beta.

I’m simply not interested in having these tools type for me. Typing is nowhere near the hardest part of my job and I find it invaluable as a meditative state for building muscle memory for the context of what I’m building.

Taking shortcuts has a cost I’m not willing to pay.

If your position is to find fault then that’s what you will accomplish.

I'm speaking from experience and observation of the past two years of LLM assistants of various kinds that outsourcing code production will atrophy your skills generally and will threaten your contextual understanding of a codebase specifically over the long term.

If that's a risk you're willing to take for the sake of productivity, that can be a reasonable tradeoff depending on your project and career goals.

It'll atrophy whose skills?

I'm using it to increase my own.

Your coding skills. If you're a new programmer, I can't emphasize this enough: Typing is good for you. Coding without crutches is necessary at this point in your career and will only become more necessary as you progress in your career. I'm a 25 year veteran professional and there's a reason I insist on writing my own code and not outsourcing that to AI.

Using AI as a rubber duck and conversation partner is great, I strongly suggest that. But you need to do the grunt work otherwise what you're doing will not lodge itself in long term memory.

It's like strength training by planning out macros, exercises, schedules and routines but then letting a robot lift those heavy ass weights, to paraphrase Ronnie Coleman.

I'm not a new programmer. I started as a teen in the 90s. I was a pro for some years, although I have not been for a few years now--I own a small B&M business.

I don't have a desire to become a great programmer, like you might. I want to program to meet real-world goals, not some kind of enlightenment. I don't want my long-term memory filled with the nuts and bolts required for grunt work; I've done plenty of programming grunt work in my life.

I am building custom solutions for my business. LLMs allow me to choose languages I don't know, and I'm certain I can get up and running near-immediately. I've learned over a dozen languages before LLMs came on the scene, and I'm tired of learning new languages, too. Or trying to memorize this syntax or that syntax.

I think your outlook is more emotional than logical.

If you're a businessman then do business, proceed. But from the beginning of this thread, I wasn't concerned with business people whose primary interest is velocity.

To each their own, and everyone's experience seems to vary, but I have a hard time picturing people using Claude/ChatGPT web UIs for any serious developmen. It seems like so much time would he wasted recreating good context, copy/pasting, etc.

We have tools like Aider (which has copy/paste mode if you don't have API access for some reason), Cline, CoPilot edit mode, and more. Things like having a conventions file and exposing the dependencies list and easy additional of files into context seem essential to me in order to make LLMs productive, and I always spend more time steering results when easy consistent context isn't at my fingertips.

Before tue advent of proper IDE integrations and editors like Zed, copy pasting form the web UI was basically how things were done, and man was it daunting. As you say, having good, fine grained, repeatable and we'll integrated context management is paramount to efficient LLM based work.

You gave me flashbacks of editing html, php, and perl in some shitty web editor within cPanel in the 1990s.

That was before, or maybe alongside, my Notepad++ / CuteFTP workflow.

Both these issues can be resolved by adding some sample code to context to influence the LLM to do the desired thing.

As the op says, LLMs are going to be biased towards doing the "average" thing based on their training data. There's more old backend code on the internet than new backend code, and Tailwind is pretty dominant for frontend styling these days, so that's where the average lands.