In my experience, it's definitely faster to do manually if it's something that you know well. What LLMs enable is to skip research and learning by producing usable code immediately.
In my experience, it's definitely faster to do manually if it's something that you know well. What LLMs enable is to skip research and learning by producing usable code immediately.
There is a long way between "usable code" and "the code I actually want". And each change I ask for piles on the slop. I don't get the slop when I just spend the same amount of time to write it out myself.
Most of what I find AI useful for is analyzing large volumes of data and summarizing, like looking in log files for a problem, or compiling reports from tons of JSON data. But even for those use cases, a simple CTRL-F is way way faster.