Comment by georgemcbay

> But if I have _no_ idea things go wildly off course.

This is the key to getting some amount of productivity from LLMs in my experience, the ability to spot very quickly when they veer off course into fantasyland and nip it in the bud.

Then you point out the issue to them, they agree that they made a dumb mistake and fix it, then you ask them to build on what you just agreed to and they go and reintroduce the same issue they just agreed with you was an obvious problem... because ultimately they are more fancy auto complete machines than they are actual thinking machines.

I have found them to be a time saver on the whole even when working with new languages but I think this may in large part be helped by the fact that I have literally decades of coding experience that sets off my spidey senses as soon as they start going rampant.

I can't begin to imagine how comical it must be when someone who doesn't have a strong programming foundation just blindly trusts these things to produce useful code until the runtime or compile time bugs become unavoidably obvious.