3 ms·

This really touches on it. I'm a big advocate of these tools, but they author approximately zero lines of my code, yet I still find them invaluable and a wonder

This really touches on it. I'm a big advocate of these tools, but they author approximately zero lines of my code, yet I still find them invaluable and a wonderful tool to leverage, and do so constantly. Particularly in challenging projects and needs. I suspect many who find them useless and decry them were sold an exaggerated utility and then were disappointed when they tried to generate libraries or even functions, then feeling deceived when there are errors or flaws, etc.

marxisttemp 2y ago
Yes, absolutely, they’re an ideal rubber duck and I’ve come to really value them for my work. Checking your sanity, pondering how certain operations might be implemented or how they could be optimized, finding where a logic bug might be in a snippet of code…
JohnMakin 2y ago
> I suspect many who find them useless and decry them were sold an exaggerated utility and then were disappointed when they tried to generate libraries or even functions, then feeling deceived when there are errors or flaws, etc. No, I suspect the large majority (and this has been backed by surveys) of people that are dismissive of them are more senior and have been working in highly specific problem domains for a long time where this is rarely/never a good "general" answer for a problem, and have spent an inordinate amount of time debugging LLM-generated or LLM-Advised code by their peers that contains nefarious and subtle errors that look correct at a glance. I personally can tell you that for what I work on, in my domain, these tools have been a net time suck and not a gain, and I pretty much only use them to ask questions about documentation, which it often gets incorrect anyway (again, in subtle ways that are probably hard for someone who isn't very senior to detect). Hope that helps.

3 ms·

This really touches on it. I'm a big advocate of these tools, but they author approximately zero lines of my code, yet I still find them invaluable and a wonder

by llm_nerd 2y ago

marxisttemp 2y ago
Yes, absolutely, they’re an ideal rubber duck and I’ve come to really value them for my work. Checking your sanity, pondering how certain operations might be implemented or how they could be optimized, finding where a logic bug might be in a snippet of code…
JohnMakin 2y ago
> I suspect many who find them useless and decry them were sold an exaggerated utility and then were disappointed when they tried to generate libraries or even functions, then feeling deceived when there are errors or flaws, etc. No, I suspect the large majority (and this has been backed by surveys) of people that are dismissive of them are more senior and have been working in highly specific problem domains for a long time where this is rarely/never a good "general" answer for a problem, and have spent an inordinate amount of time debugging LLM-generated or LLM-Advised code by their peers that contains nefarious and subtle errors that look correct at a glance. I personally can tell you that for what I work on, in my domain, these tools have been a net time suck and not a gain, and I pretty much only use them to ask questions about documentation, which it often gets incorrect anyway (again, in subtle ways that are probably hard for someone who isn't very senior to detect). Hope that helps.