Seriously!! Coding with LLM's is marketed as a huge time saver, but every time I've tried, it hasn't been. I'm told I just need to put in the time (ironic, no?) to learn to use the LLM properly. Why don't I just use that time to learn to write code better myself?
It’s not really ironic. You could spend a couple hours making yourself twice as good as using AI tools, or a couple hours making yourself like .1% of a better programmer, assuming you’re not banging your head against the wall anyways.
It’s one of those things where a little upskilling can make a big impact. So many things in life need a bit of practice before they’re useful to you.
For starters, you need to change the default prompt in your editor to make it do what you want. If it does something annoying or weird, put it in the prompt to not take that approach. For me, that was absurdly long, useless explanations. And now it’s short and sweet.
Seriously!! Cars are marketed as a huge time saver, but every time I’ve tried one, they haven’t been. I’m told I just need to put in the time (ironic, no?) to learn to drive properly. Why don’t I just use that time to train my legs and run faster instead?
I think the difference here is it is not at all obvious to me that an LLM is a force multiplier on same the order as cars to legs.
Cars are pretty easy to observe in action doing what they promise to do. Driving a car is a very straightforward, mechanical, repeatable, intuitive operation.
Working with an LLM is not repeatable or straightforward.
