Comment by bonesss
Challenging my own LLM experiences cynically: for a period it really does feel like I’m interactively getting exactly what I need… but given that the end result is generated and I have to then learn it, I’m left in much the same situation you mentioned of looking at the developer docs where a better cleaner version exists.
Subjectively interacting with an LLM gives a sense of progress, but objectively downloading a sample project and tutorial gets me to the same point with higher quality materials much faster.
I keep thinking about research on file navigation via command line versus using a mouse. People’s subjective sense of speed and capability don’t necessarily line up with measurable outcomes.
LLMs can do some amazing things, but violently copy and pasting stack overflow & randomness from GitHub can too.
Right. This is how I feel. I can get the LLM to generate code that more or less does what I need, but if I objectively look at the result and the effort required to get there it's still not at the point where it's doing it faster and better than what I could have got manually (with exceptions for certain specific use cases that are not generally applicable to the work I want to do).
The time I save on typing out the program is lost to new activities I otherwise wouldn't be doing.