Personal projects? Frequently ask LLMs to teach me and then do it myself. Kind of like google on steroids because they can see what I’m doing / trying to do. Is easy to fall into the trap of “do it for me” but if you have some discipline it can be helpful.
Professionally? Hard to care at this point. Tried to fight for good engineering decisions but got vetoed for the sake of “go fast” so many times I pretty much vibe everything.
I think the problem is that decision makers /people in power often don’t understand the technical jargon either. All that matters is, “is it working?” So once they see that they can get it “working” without paying for the expertise, they will take it.
The thing is also - the LLM will eventually get it wrong, but the frontier models are pretty good at fixing it if you can articulate the problem. Even non technically.
Under the hood? Impossible to understand. But it works!
Counterpoint - system architecture is really built around helping humans to build mental models of systems. If your plan is to have LLMs to all the work in the future, those mental models no longer matter the way they did in the past.
Probably, systems will break, and LLM costs will rise, and the arithmetic will shift - but that isn’t happening fast enough to stop the brain drain and negative pressure on employment and compensation.
At least you recognize it. That’s really no different from before LLMs though. In fact, learning tech before was even more work, because you’d have to go read a bunch of docs to learn syntax, etc.
So for you it sounds like less a question of “how do I not use it” and more a question of “how do I hold myself accountable to learning a thing”. At the end of the day, either you want to learn or you don’t. LLMs are just a tool.