I agree, but even smaller than thinking in agile is just a tight iteration loop when i'm exploring a design. My ADHD makes upfront design a challenge for me and I am personally much more effective starting with a sketch of what needs to be done and then iterating on it until I get a good result.
The loop of prompt->study->prompt->study... is disruptive to my inner loop for several reasons, but a big one is that the machine doesn't "think" like i do. So the solutions it scaffolds commonly make me say "huh?" and i have to change my thought process to interpet them and then study them for mistakes. My intution and iteration is, for the time being, more effective than this machine assited loop for the really "interesting" code i have to write.
But i will say that AI has been a big time saver for more mundane tasks, especially when I can say "use this example and apply it to the rest of this code/abstraction".
My thoughts exactly as an ADHD dev.
Was having trouble describing my main issue with LLM-assisted development...
Thank you for giving me the words!
> As personal choice, we tend not to use debuggers beyond getting a stack trace or the value of a variable or two. One reason is that it is easy to get lost in details of complicated data structures and control flow; we find stepping through a program less productive than thinking harder and adding output statements and self-checking code at critical places. Clicking over statements takes longer than scanning the output of judiciously-placed displays. It takes less time to decide where to put print statements than to single-step to the critical section of code, even assuming we know where that is. More important, debugging statements stay with the program; debugging sessions are transient.
I tend to agree with them on this. For almost all of the work that I do, this hypothesis-logs-exec loop gets me to the answer substantially faster. I'm not "trying to run the code forwards in my head". I already have a working model for the way that the code runs, I know what output I expect to see if the program is behaving according to that model, and I can usually quickly intuit what is actually happening based on the incorrect output from the prints.
[0] The unreasonable effectiveness of print debugging (349 points, 354 comments) April 2021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26925570