Probably Dance

Studies have shown that LLMs help novice programmers more than experienced programmers. This matches my experience. At work I see that interns or new hires have some LLM window open almost all the time. I use them maybe once a week. But you could say the same thing about Stack Overflow. I used it all the time when I started programming. Now I use it occasionally. While it’s easy to point at their obvious issues, I think they are also clearly a net-positive on average. So how do LLMs help me?

Big plus: Languages that I don’t use as often

I don’t often write SQL statements. I can obviously write the simple ones, but SQL is a language that has all the features you could ever possibly want, and I don’t know how to use them and don’t know how to google for them. So I ask a LLM. Similarly for javascript/css/html programming. I used to hate doing web frontend work, now it’s not so bad because LLMs can help me get out of the tricky edge cases.

I have also used LLMs to translate functionality from one language to another. E.g. if I know what a function is called in C++ but I can’t find an equivalent one in the standard library of another language, an LLM will often do a decent first pass of rewriting the C++ function in the other language.

Small minus: The code is overly generic