Also true for deciding whether to write code at all! About 15 years ago I was working with a junior who'd spent 3 hours trying to automate some data editing until I said "mate, you can just edit it all by hand in about an hour!"

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taeric 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

I had a similar one where a billing mistake had happened in a system and the other devs were trying to find out how to determine all of the bad values. I asked if they had simply looked at the top N that could fit on their screen sorted by value. The incorrect values were the obvious outliers. Only about 4 of them. They had been blocked on identifying them for about an hour.

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VBprogrammer 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Funny enough, with LLMs this trade off may well have flipped. For simple tasks like given a string like X, format it like Y, they work amazingly well.

	▲	scott_w 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Absolutely. Even back then, trying to script it would sometimes be fine. I've had plenty of situations where I'd try to write a script, give it 30 minutes then say "fuck it, I'm hand-fixing it." The same probably applies to LLMs, you just need to set a cut-off point before it stops being worthwhile.

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lettuceconstant 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Sure, but I have to obtain my dopamine somehow.