Post

One of my big boundaries for my personal LLM usage is to never let the LLM author any prose or code for me. I always type it out myself Hell, even in the pre-LLM era I never used IDE tools for code generation. Typing/writing things out or saying something in my own words is very important to me

My reason for doing this is very similar to why rubber duck debugging works so well: the act of saying something in one's own words (or to type it out with one's own fingers) forces one to make a deeper level of mental contact with it than we normally would and greatly improves accuracy/quality

I vaguely remember that back in the day Zed Shaw's "Learn X the hard way" courses would begin every course by saying "DO NOT COPY AND PASTE THE EXAMPLES IN THIS COURSE. TYPE THEM OUT" and he said the reason why is because the act of typing it out greatly improves your comprehension of the material

Typing is also not wasted time! Your brain doesn't shut off when you type something out. Your mind brainstorms and thinks actively about useful related things in the background. That sort of regular mental downtime to reflect about what's going on is important to sustainable coding work