I’ve seen a few articles saying that instead of hating AI, the real quiet programmers young and old are loving it and have a renewed sense of purpose coding with llm helpers (this article was also hating on ed zitiron, which makes sense why it would).
Is this total bullshit? I have to admit, even though it makes me ill, I’ve used llms a few times to help me learn simple code syntax quickly (im and absolute noob who’s wanted my whole life to learn code but cant grasp it very well). But yes, a lot of time its wrong.
From my experience it’s really great at bootstrapping new projects for you. It’s good at getting you sample files and if you’re using cursor just building out a sample project.
It’s decent at being an alternative to google/SO for syntax or previously encountered errors. There’s a few things it hallucinates but generally it can save time as long as you don’t trust it blindly.
It struggles when you give it complex tasks or not-straightforward items. Or things that require a lot of domain knowledge. I once wanted to see what css classes were still in use across a handful of react components and it just shat the bed.
The people who champion AI as a human replacement will build a quick proof of concept with it and proclaim “oh shit this is awesome!” And not realize that that’s the easy part of software engineering.