I see this argument a lot and I don’t think I’m buying it to be honest. Please don’t take this personally, even though I’m replying to you, I’m not talking specifically about you.
The reason why I’m skeptical is that this argument is based entirely on self-reports and humans have very limited introspection. We are masters of reframing and rationalization and have complex psychological mechanisms working day and night to preserve our self-image.
So what is it we’re trying to rationalize when we claim that LLMs free our brain cycles to think more about important stuff? I think it’s the usual suspect - avoiding doing the hard thing. Deep focused work is hard and unpleasant and LLMs can be easily used to shortcut it. It’s a job, after all, it’s natural to want to work a little bit less hard. To cope with that, we tell ourselves that the work that we off-load to LLMs wasn’t worth doing anyway and we now focus more on real architecture. This usually takes a form of chatting with Claude about some galaxy brain concepts or drawing boxes in Figma or whatnot.
Of course, there is no way for me to know for sure what’s going on in other people’s heads. But that is aligned with my personal experience. I can’t think of a single great engineer who I personally worked with who jumped on the Claude train and is killing it. They’re all skeptical to some degree. I also haven’t met a single Claude-powered engineer since November 2025 who would impress and inspire me! Even though that used to happen a lot. There is, however, no shortage of people who fall deeper and deeper into the death spiral of LLM-induced building spree. They build and build and build completely unconstrained by anything with every their idea being validated and encouraged by AI. Every day, as they produce thousands lines of code, they step by step detach from reality.
That is pretty scary and FWIW I think that’s to be expected. AI is a novel technology and we have to figure out how to use it responsibly.
