The only viewpoint I really agree with in this article is the "use it or lose it" mentality. Skills are developed and maintained by practicing them, but if all the author really wants to do is write code, then LLMs are literally an answer to their prayers!

You can enable virtually free test driven development. Write the test names down and let the LLM implement them for you. You save 50% of your time and you get to go to town on implementation and or optimizations.

You can have the LLM take the non-tech-counterparts description of a bug and have it point you at precise lines of code to investigate rather than grepping around a codebase you might not know well.

You can onboard to new languages, frameworks, repositories extremely fast by having a partner (the LLM) explain implementation patterns and approaches on demand! You don't even need to talk to another human being! Get your questions answered in seconds and start coding!

You can rapidly prototype. You can get immediate code reviews. You can rubber duck. You can visualize business/logic flows and code branching to better understand existing implementations. You can even have the LLM write an implementation plan for you then write the code yourself!

If you cant find a way to write more code with LLMs, its either an imagination or skill issue.

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pavel_lishin 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> You can enable virtually free test driven development. Write the test names down and let the LLM implement them for you. You save 50% of your time and you get to go to town on implementation and or optimizations.

That's assuming that it writes good tests, and that you don't care to take the time to verify the tests it wrote, no?

	▲	steve_adams_86 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I do find LLMs useful for scaffolding this stuff, but yeah, good test writing still seems to require a lot of hand-holding. I don't mind. I'm happy with my tests and they get written faster. Hand-holding and verifying is still faster than how I used to do it, and the LLMs admittedly capture more cases than I did without them. They will try to create test cases that make no sense too, but it's worth having to delete if it means it also comes up with test cases that I didn't.

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footy 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

all of this sounds awful

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thomas_moon 38 minutes ago | parent [-]

The whole point of my post is that you get to pick and choose what parts this magical software automates for you. Based on your response, it's an imagination issue for you.

	▲	footy 27 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I can imagine doing it and I have in fact used it to automate things like tests. This usually leads to me having to rewrite the tests and spending more time on them than I otherwise would have. Or delete tests that test trivial functionality, or add tests for x even when I specifically mentioned it in my prompt. Being able to imagine something doesn't mean I have to like it.

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anikom15 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

LLM’s can write documentation well, too.

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truetraveller 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

No. There's a difference between writing code, and getting code written. LLMs are the second.