LLMs are tools. If you master your tools, you become more productive. I've had the same mixed experiences with LLMs that others have. Some good, some not so great. But I've been merging quite a bit of codex created PRs in the last weeks. Some needed manual intervention. Some were tedious to create. And some clearly saved me a lot of work.

I always have more work than I can handle. Part of my job is deciding what not to do and what to drop because it hasn't got the right priority. Me spending an afternoon on a thing that is fun but not valuable is usually a bad use of my time. With LLMs, I'm taking on a few more of the things that I previously wouldn't have. That started with a few hobby projects that I'm now doing that I previously wasn't. And it's creeping into work as well. LLMs struggle on larger code bases. But less so with recent model releases.

> LLMs are tools. If you master your tools, you become more productive.

LLMs are unpredictable tools which change all the time, let’s not pretend otherwise. You can’t “master” them in the same way as previous tools. You can learn some tricks to trick them to be closer to what you want, and that’s about it.

Imagine if every time you did the exact same movement to hammer a nail, you had to check your work. Maybe this time it hammered it in perfectly, or maybe it smashed your finger, or maybe it only went half-way through. You could never develop muscle memory for such a tool. You could use it, sure, but never master it.

a crack pipe is a tool. if you master your tools you become more productive. i've had the same mixed experiences with crack cocaine that others have. some good, some not so great. But i've been writing a lot of crack-fueled PRs in the last weeks. some needed manual intervention. some were tedious to create. and some clearly saved me a lot of work.