> Most of the "LLMs are slowing me down/are trash/etc" discussions I've had at work usually come from people who are not great developers to begin with

This seems to be something both sides of the debate agree on: Their opponents are wrong because they are subpar developers.

It seems uncharitable to me in both cases, and of course it is a textbook example of an ad hominem fallacy.

Well both sides could be right, no? I don't think it is necessarily uncharitable to note that lack of experience could cause developers to have strongly held, yet potentially invalid opinions about the practical applications of a technology.

I think it’s actually a combination of people who have seen bad results from ai code generation (and have not looked deeper or figured out how to wield it properly yet) and another segment of the developer population who are now feeling threatened because it’s doing stuff they can’t do. Different groups

> Most of the "LLMs are slowing me down/are trash/etc" discussions I've had at work usually come from people who are not great developers to begin with - they end up tangled into a net of barely vetted code that was generated for them.

This might be your anecdotal experience but in mine, reviewing large diffs of (unvetted agent-written) code is usually not much faster than writing it yourself (especially when you have some mileage in the codebase), nor does it offset the mental burden of thinking how things interconnect and what the side effects might be.

What IMO moves the needle towards slower is that you have to steer the robot (often back and forth to keep it from undoing its own previous changes). You can say it's bad prompting but there's no guarantee that a certain prompt will yield the desired results.

That's my feeling as well, I work on a fairly large and old code base I know pretty well, and generally Claude doesn't build things really faster than I would and then I spend more time reviewing. I end up using it for the most boring tasks (like dumb refactoring/code reorganization) where review is dumb as well and try to have it work when I'm not myself coding (like during meetings etc), this way I never lose time.

It's definitely anecdotal - and I agree about steering the robot. I find that analysis is harder than creation usually.

I think that is the skill that separates agentic power users from others.

You have to be really good at skimming code quickly and looking at abstractions/logic.

Through my career, I almost never ask another team a question about their services, etc. I always built the habit of just looking at their code first. 9 times out of 10, I could answer my question or find a workaround for the bug in their code.

I think this built the skill of holding a lot of structure in my head and quickly accumulating it.

This is the exact thing you need when letting an agent run wild and then making sure everything looks ok.

I use Claude Code within Pycharm and I see the git diff format for changes there.

EDIT: It shows the side-by-side view by default, but it is easy to toggle to a unified view. There's probably a way to permanently set this somewhere.

This is a part of why I (sometimes, depending) still use Aider. It’s a more manual AI coding process.

I also like how it uses git, and it’s good at using less context (tool calling eats context like crazy!)

Absolutely - one of my favorite uses of Aider is telling it to edit config files/small utility scripts for me. It has prompted me to write more comments and more descriptive variable names to make the process smoother, which is a win by itself. I just wish it could analyze project structure as well as Claude Code... if I end up with less work at work I might try to poke at that part of the code.

I too have observed that aider seems to use significantly less context than claude code though I have found myself drifting from its use more and more in favor of claude code as skills and such have been added. I may have to revisit it soon. What are you using now instead (as you had said sometimes, depending)?

Note that Aider is not much maintained over last 3 months or so, there is a fork Aider CE, though I'm just watching their changes through rss and not used myself.

I'm more in Opencode world now and its in general more efficient for me (I'm sorta sysadmin by day, not a programmer, so agentic mode with Opencode saves a lot of time cuz you can just tell - write adhoc Python script and check which objects/methods present at that library- savings me from a boring part of you know programming/diving deep in unknown languages).

On Aider part, I especially liked ability to nitpick the function name, which is great for more focused changes/investigations.

> which is like Claude Code, but it shows you all the code changes in git diff format

Claude Code does this, you just have to not click “Yes and accept all changes”

why do i have to choose? in opencode, i can have both, let it run autonomously, but also look at the diff and whenever it goes off rails, i can stop it