20 years of experience, for what it’s worth, and a vehemently disagree. But to extend an olive branch, I think a big reason for the seemingly polar opposite reception of LLM coding online is the context.
If you give an LLM all the tools it needs to write, research and verify it’s code, to test the result (for example, in a browser), give it access to all the context it needs, like documentation, use it for code that is new, but not largely novel (CRUD business app vs. invent a new algorithm) and a competent person uses it, it’s genuinely great. Great in a way no sane person could deny.
Inversely, if you’re working in a shitty environment already, without documentation, where everything exists as implicit knowledge in peoples heads, where you can’t test and develop freely, where you’re forced to use shit LLMs or “hardened” aka shitty tools, for a extremely uncommon domain, you might have worse experiences.
20 years of experience, for what it’s worth, and a vehemently disagree. But to extend an olive branch, I think a big reason for the seemingly polar opposite reception of LLM coding online is the context.
If you give an LLM all the tools it needs to write, research and verify it’s code, to test the result (for example, in a browser), give it access to all the context it needs, like documentation, use it for code that is new, but not largely novel (CRUD business app vs. invent a new algorithm) and a competent person uses it, it’s genuinely great. Great in a way no sane person could deny.
Inversely, if you’re working in a shitty environment already, without documentation, where everything exists as implicit knowledge in peoples heads, where you can’t test and develop freely, where you’re forced to use shit LLMs or “hardened” aka shitty tools, for a extremely uncommon domain, you might have worse experiences.