I never tried any coding agents, but I do use LLMs just like you said - as stack overflow and it helps a lot which is fine, but I remember a year ago or so, I needed a quick javascript script for one time use and I hate javascript. I made chatGPT write the entire thing from start to finish, I didn’t even look at it, it worked fine. I bet the code was probably garbage.

I would often see devs talking about using coding agents that make them more productive. I no longer feel that bad about it actually, because now I hear they’ve relied on it so much, that they’re no longer able to write code themselves, haha.

But initially, all the craze about it did make me feel frustrated and took all the joy out of it. I don’t feel that way anymore though, I am slow compared to someone who just used autocomplete, but I know I’ve written every single line myself while those who just review code that an LLM has written probably haven’t thought about the problem they’re solving as deep as I have, leading to worse decisions in code overall while the code may still technically work.