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Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code — Ankur Sethi's Lab Notebook

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Using them to one-shot entire features leaves me unsatisfied and disoriented, but I do enjoy using them to fast-forward through the boring parts of my projects. However, allowing my coding assistant to roam free in my projects leaves me with a colossal amount of cognitive debt. I might hate the idea of poring over the Django documentation to figure out how to add tagging to my website, but I still fundamentally want to understand how it works. Just because a problem is boring doesn't mean I want to fully offload my understanding of the solution to a machine. Of course, I could review every single line of code the LLM produces. That's what most developers are expected to do in this cursed year of 2026. Robots raise PRs, humans review them. It's a brave new world. But I don't enjoy reviewing AI-generated PRs. Poring over hundreds of lines of overly-defensive, badly-commented, subtly incorrect code is not fun. I might grudgingly do it for an employer—while making sure said employer become

Despite what I said in April, I'm still using coding assistants on my personal projects. Using them to one-shot entire features leaves me unsatisfied and disoriented, but I do enjoy using them to fast-forward through the boring parts of my projects. However, allowing my coding assistant to roam free in my projects leaves me with a colossal amount of cognitive debt. I might hate the idea of poring over the Django documentation to figure out how to add tagging to my website, but I still fundamentally want to understand how it works. Just because a problem is boring doesn't mean I want to…

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