There are a lot of places where I find a lot of use from LLMs, but it’s usually grunt work that would take me a couple of hours but isn’t hard, like tests, or simple shuffling things around. It’s also quite good at “here’s a bunch of linting errors—fix them”, though of course you have to be constantly vigilant.
With real code, I’ll sometimes use it as a rubber duck or ask it to come up with some preliminary version of what I want, then refactor it mercilessly. With preexisting code I usually need to tell it what to do, or at least point at which files it should look at (this helps quite a lot). With anything complicated, it’s usually faster for me to just do it myself. Could just be a skill issue on my part, of course.
They are getting better. They’re still not good, but they’re often better than a random junior. My main issue is that they don’t grow. A rubbish intern will get a lot better, as long as they are capable of learning. I’m fine starting with someone on a very low level, as long as I won’t have to continuously point out the same mistakes. With an LLM this is frustrating because I have to keep pointing out things I said a couple of turns previously, or which are part of those cringe IMPORTANT prompt notes.
I still prefer to just ask an LLM to write me my CSS :P
One off PoC website/app type things are something where LLMs shine. Or dashboards like “here’s a massive csv file with who knows what—make me a nice dashboard thingy I can use to play with the data” or “here’s an API—make me a quick n dirty website that allows me to play about with it”.
There are a lot of places where I find a lot of use from LLMs, but it’s usually grunt work that would take me a couple of hours but isn’t hard, like tests, or simple shuffling things around. It’s also quite good at “here’s a bunch of linting errors—fix them”, though of course you have to be constantly vigilant.
With real code, I’ll sometimes use it as a rubber duck or ask it to come up with some preliminary version of what I want, then refactor it mercilessly. With preexisting code I usually need to tell it what to do, or at least point at which files it should look at (this helps quite a lot). With anything complicated, it’s usually faster for me to just do it myself. Could just be a skill issue on my part, of course.
They are getting better. They’re still not good, but they’re often better than a random junior. My main issue is that they don’t grow. A rubbish intern will get a lot better, as long as they are capable of learning. I’m fine starting with someone on a very low level, as long as I won’t have to continuously point out the same mistakes. With an LLM this is frustrating because I have to keep pointing out things I said a couple of turns previously, or which are part of those cringe IMPORTANT prompt notes.
I still prefer to just ask an LLM to write me my CSS :P
One off PoC website/app type things are something where LLMs shine. Or dashboards like “here’s a massive csv file with who knows what—make me a nice dashboard thingy I can use to play with the data” or “here’s an API—make me a quick n dirty website that allows me to play about with it”.