Comment by d--b

Boilerplate is a cinch when you already know what to do.

I work in finance, I have for almost 20 years now. There are things in finance you do once every 5 years, like setting up a data source like Bloomberg in a new programming language. Now you know from the last time you did it that it’s a pain, you need to use a very low level api, handling all the tiny messages yourself, building up the response as it comes from the source in unordered packets. It’s asynchronous, there is a message queue, and what I specialize in is maths.

Now I could spend hours reading documents, putting crap together, and finally come up with some half baked code that ignores most possible error points.

Or I could use ChatGPT and leverage the fact that hundreds of implementations of the same module exist out there. And make something that just works.

That is the first ever coding question I asked an LLM and it literally saved me days of trial and error for something where my added value is next to zero.

Similarly I use LLMs a lot for small tasks that are in fact fairly difficult, and that don’t add any value to the solution. Things like converting data structures in an efficient way using Python idioms, or JavaScript 2023 features, that there is no way I can keep up with.