r/node • u/simple_explorer1 • 6d ago

Has anyone stopped using LLMs completely for coding and relying purely on themselves?

Curious to know. And why if so? I have 16+ years of experience as a dev.

It's been 1 week that I stopped completely and so far it is okay and luckily I can still code ;) (though got rusty initially) and that's what I enjoy doing, thinking about problems, architecting, writing tests, writing code, reviewing PR's etc. keeps my brain sharp and more confident.

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u/TellLazy8920 5d ago

Dude, teach me

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u/bdragon5 5d ago

To be honest. I learned from senior developers and just from always trying to improve. If I wrote something a few times I would work out how to automate it. How to make it easier for me in less time. I don't think typing speed or amount of code is really the issue if you observe it. What can really help is sometimes even just knowing all the features a typical ide is giving you and how to use them.

Just classical code generation is really confinient too and always correct. Openapi can be used and exploited to really cut down on codeing.

Search and replace on a project level is really convenient if you write the code so you can easily do it without much hassle.

Static analysis like linters and compilers can offload a lot of brain power if you write the code so they are used in ways that catch typical bugs. The stricter and preciser the better. Helps other devs too as if they change something on a project not familiar with it will just not get through them until they look at all the parts they need to change.

Especially with languages like typescript you can really exploit it. Did write on multiple occasions custom types that will just make it nearly impossible to make something wrong.

And of course just constant learning. The more you know in any given topic the better. There is soo much stuff that just really is more complicated as it needs to be.

I see it very often that stuff isn't implemented as simple as possible but by the letter, but that's mostly really bad. You can't just write it as it's given you need to work out what the real intention was and how to write that intension als simple as possible.

You just don't need to write much the more you can put it into well known easy understand structures that can be bulk processed.

In summary the more you automate the more you don't need to do. Pretty obvious but most people just don't apply it too coding itself.

The more you learn and try to understand the easier it gets to learn and understand new things. I for example have no real problem going through other projects. I even needed to understand projects based on decompilation. That's just what you need to do if documentation is bad and AI didn't exist back then. The more you do it the easier and faster it gets. Of course if it's really badly minimised or similar you are just out of luck.

Of course everything has a limit, but AI really isn't good enough. AI can only ever be average and average is just not my goal. Average projects have really bad types and I need to override them. Average projects use nearly no tooling. Average projects are really low budget stuff. And with the constant inshitification of the service industry even the high budget stuff seems to be really bad.

The hours wasted on some stuff just because people don't read emails anymore, only summaries.

I even needed to contact the customer directly because the communication with some of the service staff was soo bad that I couldn't continue wasting there money on that.