The Death of Procrastination: How LLMs Replaced My Excuses

I don’t think my blog has ever been this active, so I thought an explanatory post was in order. I have been using LLMs for a while now, and I think they have had a significant impact on my productivity. Here are some of the ways LLMs have affected my productivity.

Instant Feedback

The first effect is the motivation you get by having instant feedback on something you are doing. Now, LLMs are trained to please. So you need to take whatever they say with a grain of salt. But still, it is better than nothing. Having a wingman constantly cheering you on is a great motivation booster. If you have doubts about the feedback, you can always ask for a second opinion from another LLM. This is something I do quite often.

Handing over the chore

You have a problem, you know how to solve it, but you are too lazy to lay down the boilerplate. This is probably the most critical effect for me because I often delay things, leave them for another day, procrastinate, and watch an episode of Rick and Morty. But now, I can just ask an LLM to lay down the boilerplate for me, and I can jump right into the core logic of the problem. This actually makes it difficult to leave stuff half-done.

Unbiased search results

One of the most powerful things about LLMs that I think isn’t being given enough credit is their search capability. You know, in the good old days, we could search for stuff and generally find what we were looking for—or at least something close to it. But now, we can just ask an LLM to search for stuff, and it will give us pretty good results. Sometimes they can come up with alternative methods that are new to you. Now, I’m not sure how long this will last, because I think this is a serious contender for Google’s main business model: the search engine. I hope they will not dilute this with ads and SEO spam.

Killing the Context Switch

Before LLMs, a complex bug meant twenty browser tabs, StackOverflow rabbit holes, and inevitably forgetting why I opened the terminal in the first place. Now, I stay in my environment. Whether I’m wrestling with Go or Ruby, I can keep my focus localized. The LLM acts as a localized documentation layer that understands my specific context, not just generic examples.

The Infinite Intern

There are tasks that are too small to outsource but too annoying to do yourself—like writing unit tests for a simple utility or converting a JSON schema to a struct. LLMs are the perfect interns: they don’t complain, they don’t need coffee breaks, and they do the “grunt work” in seconds. This leaves more brainpower for actual architecture and high-level design, or, you know, more time for black metal.

Summary

To boil it down for those with the attention span of a social media algorithm: LLMs haven’t replaced my brain, but they have certainly replaced my excuses. By providing instant feedback, handling the mindless boilerplate, and offering unfiltered search results, they’ve removed the friction that usually leads to “I’ll do it tomorrow.” It turns out I’m much more productive when I don’t have to spend three hours figuring out why a regex pattern isn’t working or searching for a library that Google decided to hide behind five pages of sponsored content.

The Verdict

Are LLMs a “silver bullet”? Probably not. They are more like a high-powered excavator for the digital trenches. They won’t tell you what to build, but they’ll sure as hell help you dig the hole faster. For a developer—especially one who’d rather be doing literally anything else than writing repetitive setup code—the choice is simple: adapt or spend your life staring at a blinking cursor.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some “core logic” to attend to. Or maybe another episode of Rick and Morty. At least now, I can claim I’m “supervising” my digital intern while I do it.