I write everything the normal way, without LLMs.

But yeah, it’s really depressing. People that used to be thinking about new ideas, tools, libraries, or methodologies now spend all of their time fiddling with prompts. It just sucks all of the air out of the room. People generate so much shit now that has no business existing, because there’s no friction in doing so. We fundamentally need to struggle with systems in order to understand them enough to make something better. Writing code was never the bottleneck, comprehension was. And struggling to understand is how one acquired comprehension. Now, things are so much worse. Not only are people not spending the necessary time to comprehend systems, but they are producing code at a rate far greater than anyone can comprehend. It’s an ever-increasing mountain of comprehension debt, and it’s poisoned the entire ecosystem. That’s what people just don’t get.