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I think Andrej Karpathy's quote summarizes well what all software engineers are going through:

,,you can outsource your thinking but not your understanding''

There's just no way to not generate much more amount of code with LLMs than we would do as humans, so well structuring code gets much more important than ever before.

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I don't fully agree with the quote. You can't really outsource thinking nor understanding. You can outsource the generation of streams of tokens that may or may not be appropriate for what you're looking for. But you absolutely have to know what you're looking for, or have a very solid intuition of what it should look like and behave, otherwise you're just digging your own grave.

The skill is in making the LLMs reliably generate useful and pertinent streams of tokens. That takes work, reading the output, intuition, experience, rigor, real commitment to doing good work, not fall prey to being lazy, etc.

The compounding issue is that understanding atrophies without thinking constantly reinforcing it. Shed no tears for the boilerplate, but the exercise is useful.

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