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Here’s how I use LLMs to help me write code | Simon Willison
(simonwillison.net)
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I’ve almost completely stopped using them, unless I’m stuck at a dead end. In the end all they have done is slow me down and make me unable to think properly anymore. They usually write way too much code, especially with tab complete stuff, resulting in me needing to delete code after hitting tab (what’s the point even, intellisense has always been really good and now it’s somehow worse). They’re usually wrong unless prompted multiple times. People say you can use them to generate boilerplate, but just use a language with less or no boilerplate like Kotlin. There’s usually very subtle bugs they introduce or they’re solving a problem that is simply documented on stack overflow, while I wouldn’t be using an LLM if I could just kagi it, so they solve the wrong thing.
One thing it’s decent for, if you don’t care about code quality, is converting code to a language you do not know. You’re not going to end up with good idiomatic code at the end, but it will probably function.
None of this is to say that the LLMs aren’t amazing, but if you start to depend on them you very very quickly realize that your ability to solve more complex problems will atrophy. And then when you get to a difficult problem you now waste much more time trying to solve a problem that might have been simpler for past you.
My 2cents
It's also trained on other people's code, it may use outdated, inefficient, or otherwise bad code. If it would be trained on my code, I'd like it much more