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 speaking for them, but I use LLMs for this. You have lines of repetitive code, and you realize you need to swap the order of things within each line. You could brute force it, or you could write a regex search/replace. Instead, you tell the LLM to do it and it saves a lot of time.
Swapping the order of things is just one example. It can change capitalization, insert values, or generate endless amounts of mock data.
yup! absolutely this too - i provided a different example in my reply, but honestly this is exactly the thing i use it for most… type a couple of lines, it gets the idea of what you’re trying to copy, and then it’s just hitting accept until it’s done… it’s pretty close to 100% accurate, and even if it’s not… fixing it ain’t exactly hard!
Ah! That does seem useful indeed! Even just generating a bunch a dummy data.
I was tasked once with writing a front-end for an API that didn’t exist yet, but I had a model. I could have written a loop that generated “Person Man 1”, “Person Man 2”, etc. with all of the associated fields, but instead I gave the LLM my class definition and it spat out 50 people with unique names, phone numbers, emails, and everything. It made it easy to test the paging and especially the filtering. It also took like 30 seconds to ask for and receive.
I originally asked it to make punny names based on celebrities, and it said “I can’t do that.” ☹️