What LLM coding agents have taken from me

I started a new job recently. The place is all in on coding agents (Claude) - I reckon close to 100% of the code is LLM-generated, and I haven’t written any code myself in months. This is proving hard for me to deal with, psychologically. In some ways it is nice, because you can get things done in a day or two that would have taken weeks without LLMs. In other ways it is awful, because you can get things done in a day or two that would have taken weeks without LLMs; but without building up the mental context or exercising the same cognitive muscle (i.e. learning) that you would have previously (and introducing technical debt no one has a good overview of, but who cares, the LLM can fix it with more tokens). Reading is still important, but it is an inhuman reading of AI-generated code and technical “writing”, and since the generated code is so good most of the time (depending on your task), there is little incentive to read it properly (Claude does the code reviews at my new job too).…