I'm somebody who used to think your way until very recently (long-time vim user, fast typer, etc.). I'd recommend you give `aider` specifically a try. It's slo

I'm somebody who used to think your way until very recently (long-time vim user, fast typer, etc.). I'd recommend you give `aider` specifically a try. It's slowly taken over more and more of the "what" and "how" buckets outlined in the article, especially for large-surface-area code bases. It turns out, for me at least, there is a big mental activation hurdle between "what" and "how". I need a lot of focus time to pivot between "what" and "how" efficiently, especially for work that spans large parts of the codebase, and work that I'm not super excited about doing. Using `aider` has lowered this activation threshold dramatically. It's made "writing code" about as simple as talking about a technical solution with an intelligent colleague. I usually follow the format (1) describe the context of the app / problem you're trying to solve (2) describe what you know the solution will look like (3) ask it for clarifying questions / if it needs any examples or context to know the problem space better, and if the solution makes sense / do they see any issues with it? (4) ask it to outline the solution in greater detail, do not write code (5) add any clarifications, now do the thing. i.e. it's kind of similar to interacting with a super fast, eager, indefatigable junior engineer. Sometimes it misses things or misunderstands, but not nearly enough to make the juice not worth the squeeze. These days, I'd say I spend more time reading/editing claude-generated code, writing commit messages, and managing deployments than I do writing code. It's a higher level of abstraction and I get way more leverage out of the deal. The code I'm writing is, on balance, better than the code I wrote before. It took maybe a few months to get here, but I'm happier for giving it a shot.