All that said, I definitely came away from this experiment with a strong intuition for exactly how it could take 20% longer to do things when you have LLM coding agents assisting you.
Could you elaborate, or does it boil down to “Helping Claude would have taking 2 days, and doing it on your own would have been faster”? I would be keen for patterns that help me distinguish between
I am making good progress with Claude, and would be slower alone
Claude is slowing me down right now and I should pivot to doing the task myself
Neither of those. It’s “Claude generated an extremely shiny toy in the process of attempting to solve my problem. Playing with that toy felt like productive work, and so I spent a substantial amount of time playing with that toy and LARPing at being productive rather than doing what I was originally trying to do.”
Problem exists between keyboard and chair, as the saying goes.
Could you elaborate, or does it boil down to “Helping Claude would have taking 2 days, and doing it on your own would have been faster”? I would be keen for patterns that help me distinguish between
I am making good progress with Claude, and would be slower alone
Claude is slowing me down right now and I should pivot to doing the task myself
Neither of those. It’s “Claude generated an extremely shiny toy in the process of attempting to solve my problem. Playing with that toy felt like productive work, and so I spent a substantial amount of time playing with that toy and LARPing at being productive rather than doing what I was originally trying to do.”
Problem exists between keyboard and chair, as the saying goes.