It’s weird to me how inconsistent people’s reported experience with AI coding tools can be. Someone else in this thread said it “feels like developing software with a cheat code enabled using claude code”.

I’m glad for my own sake to be able to say that I don’t have enough experience with LLMs to know which would be closer to my experience. (Though if I had to guess, I can’t imagine I’d ever feel subjectively like I was having a “good” experience with it.)

But I do wonder what the difference is between the different experiences. I suppose it could be some tools are “better” than others, but I doubt it. Maybe some people are more skilled at bending LLMs to their will. But if I had to bet, (and not to say this is necessarily the case about aesthelete specifically), there’s a certain amount of evidence that people who have “good experiences” with LLMs may be self-deluded. The existence of “AI psychosis” points that direction. But I’ve heard “self-delusion” used as an explanation for why GenAI tends to make a lot of people less productive while making them feel more productive.