The vacuum cleaner analogy didn't land for me. I've bought that vacuum cleaner, and I didn't return it. I'm referring to one of the countless models of robot v

The vacuum cleaner analogy didn't land for me. I've bought that vacuum cleaner, and I didn't return it. I'm referring to one of the countless models of robot vacuum, of course. They clean the floor, most of it, most of the time, but they miss spots, they get stuck on things, and they don't have the suction of a full-size vacuum. I wish none of those things were true, but it saves me labor nonetheless, so I kept it. I can detail corners and pull the thing off the corner of the rug, and still get a mostly-clean floor, automatically. Sure, it doesn't get all the schmutz out of carpets, but it gets enough that I can go over them monthly instead of weekly. Yes, I'm talking about LLM code assistants. They have embarrassing failure modes, but experienced developers get a sense of what they can and can't do, and the result is something which saves time. I've found they're particularly good at "dumb debugging", where there's some fat-fingered error in the code and I can't spot it just by looking. I can copypasta the function into ChatGPT in seconds, and it gives a step-by-step description of what the code does, which routinely points out exactly where the bug is. I have my concerns about what these tools will do to the up-and-coming generation of developers, it's easy to imagine them as a crutch, training wheels which never come off. But that's a separate matter, and I trust that the more natively talented juniors will recognize the hazard there, and understand that a chatbot can't substitute for becoming a skilled programmer.