I think you described it much more succinctly than most people do. It's been my exact experience as well. The LLM can develop much faster than I can build a mental model. It's very easy to get to a point where you don't know what's going on, a bunch of bugs have been introduced and you can't easily fix them or refactor because you're essentially the new guy on your own project. I find myself adjusting by committing code very frequently and periodically asking the LLM to explain it to me. I often ask the LLM to confirm things are working the way it says they are and it tends to find its own bugs that way.
I use an LLM primarily for smaller, focused data analysis tasks so it's possible to move fast and still stay reasonably on top of things if I'm even a little bit careful. I think it would be really easy to trash a large code base in a hurry without some discipline and skill in using LLM. I'm finding that developing prompts, managing context, controlling pace, staying organized and being able to effectively review the LLM's work are required skills for LLM-assisted coding. Nobody teaches this stuff yet so you have to learn it the hard way.
Now that I have a taste, I wouldn't give it up. There's so much tedious stuff I just don't want to have to do myself that I can offload to the LLM. After more than 20 years doing this, I don't have the same level of patience anymore. There are also situations where I know conceptually what I want to accomplish but may not know exactly how to implement it and I love the LLM for that. I can definitely accomplish more in less time than I ever did before.
I use an LLM primarily for smaller, focused data analysis tasks so it's possible to move fast and still stay reasonably on top of things if I'm even a little bit careful. I think it would be really easy to trash a large code base in a hurry without some discipline and skill in using LLM. I'm finding that developing prompts, managing context, controlling pace, staying organized and being able to effectively review the LLM's work are required skills for LLM-assisted coding. Nobody teaches this stuff yet so you have to learn it the hard way.
Now that I have a taste, I wouldn't give it up. There's so much tedious stuff I just don't want to have to do myself that I can offload to the LLM. After more than 20 years doing this, I don't have the same level of patience anymore. There are also situations where I know conceptually what I want to accomplish but may not know exactly how to implement it and I love the LLM for that. I can definitely accomplish more in less time than I ever did before.