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.
I find it excels at one-off scripts. They are simple enough that every parameter and line of code fits in a small bit of memory. They are really bad at complex tasks, but they can help if you use it judiciously.
I used ChatGPAT to write some fairly straight forward bash scripts last week and it was mostly awful. I ended up massaging it enough to do what I needed, but I would have been better off just writing it myself and maybe asking it a couple syntax questions (although the regex I needed was one of 8 things it stumbled over)