Comment by diggan

> I am still trying to sort out why experiences are so divergent. I've had much more positive LLM experiences while coding than many other people seem to, even as someone who's deeply skeptical of what's being promised about them. I don't know how to reconcile the two.

As with many topics, I feel like you can divide people in a couple of groups. You have people who try it, have their mind blown by it, so they over-hype it. Then the polar-opposite, people who are overly dismissive and cement themselves into a really defensive position. Both groups are relatively annoying, inaccurate, and too extremist. Then another group of people might try it out, find some value, integrate it somewhat and maybe got a little productivity-boost and moves on with their day. Then a bunch of other groupings in-between.

Problem is that the people in the middle tend to not make a lot of noise about it, and the extremists (on both ends) tend to be very vocal about their preference, in their ways. So you end up perceiving something as very polarizing. There are many accurate and true drawbacks with LLMs as well, but it also ends up poisoning the entire concept/conversation/ecosystem for some people, and they tend to be noisy as well.

Then the whole experience depends a lot on your setup, how you use it, what you expect, what you've learned and so many much more, and some folks are very quick to judge a whole ecosystem without giving parts of it an honest try. It took me a long time to try Aider, Cursor and others, and even now after I've tried them out, I feel like there are probably better ways to use this new category of tooling we have available.

In the end I think reality is a bit less black/white for most folks, common sentiment I see and hear is that LLMs are probably not hellfire ending humanity nor is it digital-Jesus coming to save us all.