I don't like the artificial distinction b/w thinking and coding. I think they are intimately interwoven. Which is actually one thing I really like about the LLM because it takes away the pain of iterating on several different approaches to see how they pan out. Often it's only when I see code for something that I know I want to do it a different way. Reducing that iteration time is huge and makes me more likely to actually go for the right design rather than settling for something less good since I don't want to throw out all the "typing" I did.
Yeah these days I often give it a zero shot attempt, see where things go wrong, reset the state via git and try again. Being able to try 2-3 prototypes of varying levels of sophistication and scope is something I've done in the past manually, but doing it in an hour instead of a day is truly significant, even if they're half or a quarter of the fidelity I'd get out of a manual attempt.
Honestly, even if I did it that way and then threw it all away and wrote the whole thing manually it'd be worth using. Obviously I don't, because once I've figured out how to scope and coach to get the right result it'd be silly to throw it away, but the same value derives from that step regardless of how you follow it up.
