> Is this replacing my thinking?

I'm extremely confident the answer is yes.

But we have to judge how much value that particular thinking has.

As an instructor, I've implemented linked list functionality a zillion times. I'm on the long tail of skills-gain from each reimplementation. But every time I implement it, I'm gaining a little more.

Now, is it worth it? Probably not. The time spent on that marginal gain would be better spent implementing something more novel by hand. So punting to an LLM, while it costs me, might be a net gain in that case. But implementing another compiler? Hell yeah, that would be replacing my thinking. I've only ever made one PL/0 compiler plus that one yacc thing in compiler theory class, and those were a long time ago.

We should quantify the loss of thinking when we decide how much to punt the code creation to someone or something else.