> they are incredible help

Yes.

I use LLMs for coding in the exact opposite way as described in the video. The video says that most people start big, then the LLM fails, then they reduce the scope more and more until they're actually doing most of the work while thinking it's all the machine's work.

I use AI in two ways. With Python I ask it to write micro functions and I do all of the general architecture. This saves a lot of time, but I could do without AI if needed be.

But recently I also started making small C utilities that each do exactly one thing and for those, the LLMs write most if not all of the code. I start very small with a tiny proof of concept and iterate over it, adding functionalities here and there until I'm satisfied. I still inspect the code and suggest refactorizations, or putting things into independent, reusable modules for static linking, etc.

But I'm not a C coder and I couldn't make any of these apps without AI.

Since the beginning of the year, I made four of them. The code is probably subpar but they all work great! and never crash, and I use them every day.

I wonder what sort of training data the AI was fed with. It's possible that such if whatever was utilized most was put together into a reference cookbook a human could do most of the work almost as fast based on more normal searches of that data in an overall more efficient way.