LLMs are making me lose my savviness

The author, who has a computer engineering background and a history of building diverse software, from ML libraries to web tools, says that LLMs have stripped away the challenge and passion from development. They feel they are no longer building, only prompting, evaluating output, and repeating—experiencing none of the craft, design, or engineering problem-solving they once loved. They also note that learning with LLMs feels like reading a summary without applying it, which they find pointless.

The author acknowledges external pressure to use such tools at work to avoid being left behind, but suspects that a real productivity metric accounting for speed, technical debt, maintainability, and cost would not favor LLMs and might instead generate endless technical debt. Despite this, they still use LLMs because they are tools, consistent with their habit of experimenting with any technology.