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Comment by wewewedxfgdf | Hacker News Reader

Not for me.

My head is in exactly the same place as coding - deep technical connection to the mental model of what is being built.

I feel like I'm the crazy one these days for using LLMs as tools. I don't write code anymore, but I still do the same level of engineering. I get fantastic results with minimal slop, and I feel it's because I still use my goddamn brain and engineering skills.

The way I use LLMs seems to be most analagous to the way vibecoder's LLMs use subagents. They exist to solve a bounded task or to write specific code in support of the engineering model in my head. I intentionally never did much research into how others were using LLMs before starting myself, and it seems like that was a good thing. It seems like the majority of people have given up on thought and just slam "do my job with no mistakes or hallucinations" into a prompt and then get confused and angry when it doesn't work. Or worse, don't check if it worked and ship anyway.

Well if you're crazy we're crazy together. This is how I've been using the LLMs myself and it gives great results.

pretty sure anyone doing "real" work nowadays does it like this. The guys vibe coding in a professional setting are just frauds and the slop will catch up to them. Maybe. Its possible we're just headed to a world where the quality of all software is going to nose dive in 6 months to a year

I agree completely. Maybe binge vibe coding is "management" or "leadership" but for actually building production applications all the classic low-level concerns still apply. VIM keybindings didn't change that, autocomplete and syntax highlighting didn't change that, and having an LLM write the actual lines of code doesn't change that.

These days I have a good intuition as to where an agent can actually do what I want as opposed to creating spaghetti. The best analogy I have come up with is that LLMs are like water and will take the shape of the bowl you build.

The upside is that there's way more water than bowl. The catch is that you have to be the type of person who could build the bowl in the first place.

Delegation can still mean deep technical connection to the code, just without needing to write the code itself.

Sounds dubious. Every software architect that I encountered who did not code at the same time was a bit of an embarrassment. But everyone pretended that they know what they are doing either because they (usually management) could not evaluate usefulness or expertise of these so called "architects" or because we simply needed to keep our jobs to pay the bills.

I have bad stories about classic corporate architects too, but that's far from all there is. The job of a typical Staff / Principal in a modern organization is most often to lead, shepherd and conduct technical decisions and people to execute a project, very different from managing them as personnel. Having some hand in execution helps a lot, but the value of their contribution is typically not in the hands-on execution part.

> deep technical connection to the mental model of what is being built.

/wayfinder: Nothing is too big to plan anymore

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3lL98Pj90o

The /wayfinder Demo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=251hsWgoTPM

Does this actually work for you?

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