I was very very keen on using this tech when it just emerged and was almost addicted to it.

The feeling I was gaining was akin to scrolling one of them feed-generating apps with cat videos, or eating fast food - quick and empty joy and excitement without lasting fulfilling effect.

After months, or maybe a year of using LLMs - I realized that neither I am faster in delivering the final desired quality of the product, nor am I satisfied with where I am professionally. I lose my human skills and I forget how to get joy out of my work (and I enjoy making them computers work). I noticed how I grew negligent to the results of my work, felt disconnected from and disconcerted by it, and it was alarming sign.

Anybody who worked anywhere for long enough knows that unhappy, robbed of joy people - produce worse results.

Said that, I realized loud and clear that writing code, developing systems, is something that I want to experience joy of personally, I want my brain struggle, sweat and click through most of the parts of it, and that parts of the work that I don't enjoy doing and can be shamelessly offloaded to LLM, are, in fact, quite minimal.

On top of it, while using the LLMs (and boy was I using all of it! Sub-agents, skills, tasks! Hour-long planning-prompting exercises!), I was still noticing that when it comes to "write code" tasks - LLMs were only better and faster than me in delivering quality work when the task at hand was not my primary skill, something that I'd be below average (in my case, web-development or app development, any front-end work). And, given, that I was employed to exercise my main skill rather than secondary skills, it's almost never the case that LLMs were boosting my productivity, they required long time of baby-sitting before I'd almost certainly give up and do all of the work myself.

Admittedly, LLMs are outstanding study partners that can give pointers to where to start and what structure to stick to when learning about new project, technology, problem domain, or generating flash cards based on materials one wants to study, and that's a use of LLM that I'd probably not give up. My speed of learning new things with some LLM assist is boosted greatly, so from this perspective, one can say that LLM makes me better developer after all.