Because once you get good at using LLMs you can write it with 5 rounds with an LLM in way less time than it would have taken you to type out the whole thing yourself, even if you got it exactly right first time coding it by hand.
(I've written a fair bit about this: https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai-assisted-programming/ and https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/11/using-llms-for-code/ and 80+ examples of tools I've built mostly with LLMs on https://tools.simonwillison.net/colophon )
I've used a whole bunch of techniques.
Most of the code in there is directly copied and pasted in from https://claude.ai or https://chatgpt.com - often using Claude Artifacts to try it out first.
Some changes are made in VS Code using GitHub Copilot
I've used Claude Code for a few of them https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/agents-and-tools/claude-c...
Some were my own https://llm.datasette.io tool - I can run a prompt through that and save the result straight to a file
The commit messages usually link to either a "share" transcript or my own Gist showing the prompts that I used to build the tool in question.
(I say "most" because GPT-4.5 is 1000x the price of GPT-4o-mini, which implies to me that it burns a whole lot more energy.)
Typing speed is not usually the constraint for programming, for a programmer that knows what they are doing
Creating the solution is the hard work, typing it out is just a small portion of it
(I get boosts from LLMs to a bunch of activities too, like researching and planning, but those are less obvious than the coding acceleration.)
This explains it then. You aren't a software developer
You get a productivity boost from LLMs when writing code because it's not something you actually do very much
That makes sense
I write code for probably between 50-80% of any given week, which is pretty typical for any software dev I've ever worked with at any company I've ever worked at
So we're not really the same. It's no wonder LLMs help you, you code so little that you're constantly rusty
I very much doubt you spend 80% of your working time actively typing code into a computer.
My other activities include:
- Researching code. This is a LOT of my time - reading my own code, reading other code, reading through documentation, searching for useful libraries to use, evaluating if those libraries are any good.
- Exploratory coding in things like Jupyter notebooks, Firefox developer tools etc. I guess you could call this "coding time", but I don't consider it part of that 10% I mentioned earlier.
- Talking to people about the code I'm about to write (or the code I've just written).
- Filing issues, or updating issues with comments.
- Writing documentation for my code.
- Straight up thinking about code. I do a lot of that while walking the dog.
- Staying up-to-date on what's new in my industry.
- Arguing with people about whether or not LLMs are useful on Hacker News.
"I agree, only 10% of what I do is typing code"
"that explains it, you aren't a software developer"
What the hell?