this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2025
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As a senior dev, I have no use for it in my workflow. The only purpose it would serve for me is to reduce the amount of typing I do. I spend about 5-10% of my time actually writing code. The rest of my dev time is spent in architecting, debugging, testing, or documenting. LLMs aren't really good at most of those things once you move past the most superficial levels of complexity. Besides, I don't actually want something to reduce the amount I'm typing. If I'm typing too much and I'm getting annoyed then it's a sure sign that I've done something bad. If I'm writing boilerplate then it's time to write an abstraction to eliminate that. If I'm writing repetitive tests then it's a sign I need to move to a property based testing framework like Hypothesis. If the LLM spits all of this out for me, I will end up writing code that is harder to understand and maintain.
LLMs are fine for learning and junior positions where you'll have more experienced folks reviewing code, but it just is not that helpful past a certain point.
Also, this is probably a small thing, but I have yet to find an LLM that writes anything other than shitty, terrible shell scripts. Please for the love of God don't use an LLM to write shell scripts. If you must, then please pass the results through shellcheck and fix all of the issues there.
I've seen it mainly used to assist with python scripts which work well not sure on how well it does shell scripts
Python is my primary language. For the way I write code and solve problems, it's the language where I need the least help from an LLM. Python lets you write code that is incredibly concise while still being easy to read. There's more of a case to be made for something like Go, since it seems like every single god damned function call ends up being
variable, err := someFuckingShit()and then aif err!=niland manually handling it instead of having nice exception handling. Even there, my IDE does that for me without requiring a computationally expensive LLM to do the work.Like, some people have a more conversational development style and I guess LLMs work well for them. I end up constantly context switching between code review mode and writing code mode which is incredibly disruptive.