Finally a thread to traumadump my anxieties! I have been trying to learn programming unsuccessfully for many years (I still ocasionally get a burst of energy,

Finally a thread to traumadump my anxieties! I have been trying to learn programming unsuccessfully for many years (I still ocasionally get a burst of energy, try something, then eventually abandon it halfway). In the end, I just accept that I don't have the kind of thinking that makes this effort enjoyable and I cannot achieve anything good. But, to be fair, LLMs also don't solve any problems for me in any meaningful way. I have to do a little bit of very simple coding at work and I would say that I struggle with LLMs as much as I do when I try to solve them by myself. The code works in a moment but when it gets extended, it breaks, I spend a lot of time troubleshooting. Last week I had to rewrite the code myself as my attempt to prompt fixes with LLMs just kept adding bugs -- I can't say my rewrite is any good (I need to traverse graphs and I don't know how to do it properly so I just used whatever algorithm I found in a book lol), it will probably break the next week when I need to change it or add something but I hope at least I'll be able to fix it faster as I have roughly an idea what's happening. I haven't measured how much time I spend on things with or without LLMs but the subjective experience is pretty poor -- I work in an "engineering-heavy" company, the constant feeling of not understanding my own work among people who have master things that are 10x more complex is pretty depressing. When I program something poorly, I can at least explain what I did and what my idea was, even it was a bad one, waking up to build failures and spending an entire day relearning my own project is not good, man. As for the obvious argument -- "you're using it wrong" -- I might be? I did try to learn prompting and I don't think I do any obviously stupid stuff like specifying a persona. At this point I feel half-insane as a frequent sentiment is that non-programmers can generate code for functioning software with LLMs, perhaps it's low quality code but it works. Except for me -- a non-programmer who fumbles it every day! I don't even need anything complicated -- they're Python extensions for a Sphinx project!