I’ve seen a few articles saying that instead of hating AI, the real quiet programmers young and old are loving it and have a renewed sense of purpose coding with llm helpers (this article was also hating on ed zitiron, which makes sense why it would).
Is this total bullshit? I have to admit, even though it makes me ill, I’ve used llms a few times to help me learn simple code syntax quickly (im and absolute noob who’s wanted my whole life to learn code but cant grasp it very well). But yes, a lot of time its wrong.
Not total bullshit, but it’s not great for all use cases:
For coding tasks the output looks good on the surface but often I end up changing stuff, meaning it would have been faster up do myself.
For coding I know little about (currently writing some GitHub actions), it’s great at explaining alternatives, pros and cons, to give me a rudimentary understanding of stuff
I’ve also used it to transcribe tutorial screencasts, and then afterwards having a secondary LLM use the transcription to generate documentation (include in prompt: "when relevant, generate examples, use markdown tables, generate plantuml etc)