LLMs are not for me. My position is that the advantage we humans have over the rest of the natural world, is our minds. Our ability to think, create and express ideas is what separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. Once we give that over to "thinking" machines, we weaken ourselves, both individually and as a species.

That said, I've given it a go. I used zed, which I think is a pretty great tool. I bought a pro subscription and used the built in agent with Claude Sonnet 4.x and Opus. I'm a Rails developer in my day job, and, like MitchellH and many others, found out fairly quickly that tasks for the LLM need to be quite specific and discrete. The agent is great a renames and minor refactors, but my preferred use of the agent was to get it to write RSpec tests once I'd written something like a controller or service object.

And generally, the LLM agent does a pretty great job of this.

But here's the rub: I found that I was losing the ability to write rspec.

I went to do it manually and found myself trying to remember API calls and approaches required to write some specs. The feeling of skill leaving me was quite sobering and marked my abandonment of LLMs and Zed, and my return to neovim, agent-free.

The thing is, this is a common experience generally. If you don't use it, you lose it. It applies to all things: fitness, language (natural or otherwise), skills of all kinds. Why should it not apply to thinking itself.

Now you may write me and my experience off as that of a lesser mind, and that you won't have such a problem. You've been doing it so long that it's "hard-wired in" by now. Perhaps.

It's in our nature to take the path of least resistance, to seek ease and convenience at every turn. We've certainly given away our privacy and anonymity so that we can pay for things with our phones and send email for "free".

LLMs are the ultimate convenience. A peer or slave mind that we can use to do our thinking and our work for us. Some believe that the LLM represents a local maxima, that the approach can't get much better. I dunno, but as AI improves, we will hand over more and more thinking and work to it. To do otherwise would be to go against our very nature and every other choice we've made so far.

But it's not for me. I'm no MitchellH, and I'm probably better off performing the mundane activities of my work, as well as the creative ones, so as to preserve my hard-won knowledge and skills.

YMMV

I'll leave off with the quote that resonates the most with me as I contemplate AI:-

"I say your civilization, because as soon as we started thinking for you, it really became our civilization, which is, of course, what this is all about." -- Agent Smith "The Matrix"