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You discount the value of being intimately familiar with each line of code, the design decisions and tradeoffs because one wrote the bloody thing.

It is negative value for me to have a mediocre machine do that job for me, that I will still have to maintain, yet I will have learned absolutely nothing from the experience of building it.

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This to me seems like saying you can learn nothing from a book unless you yourself have written it. You can read the code the LLM writes the same as you can read the code your colleagues write. Moreover you have to pretty explicitly tell it what to write for it to be very useful. You're still designing what it's doing you just don't have to write every line.

Code review != code design.

Nor reading a book teaches you how to write a book.

"Reading is the creative center of a writer’s life.” — Stephen King, On Writing

You need to design the code in order to tell the LLM how to write it. The LLM can help with this but generally it's better to have a full plan in place to give it beforehand. I've said it before elsewhere but I think this argument will eventually be similar to the people arguing you don't truly know how to code unless you're using assembly language for everything. I mean sure assembly code is better / more efficient in every way but who has the time to bother in a post-compiler world?

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