(I've written a fair bit about this: https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai-assisted-programming/ and https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/11/using-llms-for-code/ and 80+ examples of tools I've built mostly with LLMs on https://tools.simonwillison.net/colophon )
I've used a whole bunch of techniques.
Most of the code in there is directly copied and pasted in from https://claude.ai or https://chatgpt.com - often using Claude Artifacts to try it out first.
Some changes are made in VS Code using GitHub Copilot
I've used Claude Code for a few of them https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/agents-and-tools/claude-c...
Some were my own https://llm.datasette.io tool - I can run a prompt through that and save the result straight to a file
The commit messages usually link to either a "share" transcript or my own Gist showing the prompts that I used to build the tool in question.
(I say "most" because GPT-4.5 is 1000x the price of GPT-4o-mini, which implies to me that it burns a whole lot more energy.)
Typing speed is not usually the constraint for programming, for a programmer that knows what they are doing
Creating the solution is the hard work, typing it out is just a small portion of it
(I get boosts from LLMs to a bunch of activities too, like researching and planning, but those are less obvious than the coding acceleration.)
Sure, it often spits out incomplete, non-ideal, or plain wrong answers, but that's where having SWE experience comes in to play to recognize it
In the middle of this thought, you changed the context from "learning new things" to "not being faster than an LLM"
It's easy to guess why. When you use the LLM you may be productive quicker, but I don't think you can argue that you are really learning anything
But yes, you're right. I don't learn new things from scratch very often, because I'm not changing contexts that frequently.
I want to be someone who had 10 years of experience in my domain, not 1 year of experience repeated 10 times, which means I cannot be starting over with new frameworks, new languages and such over and over
Here's some code I threw together without even looking at yesterday: https://github.com/simonw/tools/blob/main/incomplete-json-pr... (notes here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/28/incomplete-json-pretty... )
Reading it now, here are the things it can teach me:
:root {
--primary-color: #3498db;
--secondary-color: #2980b9;
--background-color: #f9f9f9;
--card-background: #ffffff;
--text-color: #333333;
--border-color: #e0e0e0;
}
body {
font-family: 'Segoe UI', Tahoma, Geneva, Verdana, sans-serif;
line-height: 1.6;
color: var(--text-color);
background-color: var(--background-color);
padding: 20px;
textarea:focus {
outline: none;
border-color: var(--primary-color);
box-shadow: 0 0 0 2px rgba(52, 152, 219, 0.2);
}
<button id="clearButton">
<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="16" height="16" viewBox="0 0 24 24" fill="none" stroke="currentColor" stroke-width="2" stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round">
<rect x="3" y="3" width="18" height="18" rx="2" ry="2"></rect>
<line x1="9" y1="9" x2="15" y2="15"></line>
<line x1="15" y1="9" x2="9" y2="15"></line>
</svg>
Clear
</button>
// Copy to clipboard functionality
copyButton.addEventListener('click', function() {
const textToCopy = outputJson.textContent;
navigator.clipboard.writeText(textToCopy).then(function() {
// Success feedback
copyButton.classList.add('copy-success');
copyButton.textContent = ' Copied!';
setTimeout(function() {
copyButton.classList.remove('copy-success');
copyButton.innerHTML = '<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="14" height="14" viewBox="0 0 24 24" fill="none" stroke="currentColor" stroke-width="2" stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round"><rect x="9" y="9" width="13" height="13" rx="2" ry="2"></rect><path d="M5 15H4a2 2 0 0 1-2-2V4a2 2 0 0 1 2-2h9a2 2 0 0 1 2 2v1"></path></svg> Copy to Clipboard';
}, 2000);
});
});
And the final chunk of code on the page is a very pleasing implementation of a simple character-by-character non-validating JSON parser which indents as it goes: https://github.com/simonw/tools/blob/1b9ce52d23c1335777cfedf...
That's half a dozen little tricks I've learned from just one tiny LLM project which I only spent a few minutes on.
My point here is that if you actively want to learn things, LLMs are an extraordinary gift.
I was trying to prototype a system and created a one-pager describing the main features, objectives, and restrictions. This took me about 45 minutes.
Then I feed it into Claude and asked to develop said system. It spent the next 15 minutes outputting file after file.
Then I ran "npm install" followed by "npm run" and got a "fully" (API was mocked) functional, mobile-friendly, and well documented system in just an hour of my time.
It'd have taken me an entire day of work to reach the same point.