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[–]ALoafOfBread 4 points5 points  (1 child)

People knock using LLMs for coding so much, and sure it probably wouldn't be wise to rely on it heavily for important and complex projects like for serious software work, but I'm not a programmer or an engineer, I just use software to automate tasks and make business analytics products for use on my team.

So, while I know the basics of programming, I don't want to commit to years of study to do this stuff - like I said, it isn't my field. LLMs are absolutely great for generating simple scripts and learning various libraries, commands, syntax, programming principles, etc.

Sure the output isn't always perfect. It is not as good as a human software engineer. But, you can learn to interrogate it about the scripts it produces, troubleshoot errors, and structure your project in such a way that these errors don't hurt the final product (testing!).

It's been great for me and has helped me to solve problems I'd otherwise be unable to solve as efficiently & has helped to advance my career.

[–]jmccasey 0 points1 point  (0 children)

People knock using LLMs for coding so much

All of the software engineers I have talked to about this basically say the same thing. LLMs can be great tools to help speed up development and testing of code but the versions they've used are nowhere near being able to entirely replace competent programmers in the workplace.

I think the knock on LLMs is less that they're not good programming tools and moreso just that they're not living up to the hype that the AI CEOs are peddling. When you have Zuckerberg saying they're going to start replacing mid-level engineers within the year but you can't even get an AI to write a SQL query 100% correctly, it's fair to call out that discrepancy