Comment by JKCalhoun
2 days ago
As others probably have experienced, I can only add that I am doing coding now I would have kicked down the road if I did not have LLM assistance.
Example: using LeafletJS — not hard, but I didn't want to have to search all over to figure out how to use it.
Example: other web page development requiring dropping image files, complicated scrolling, split-views, etc.
In short, there are projects I have put off in the past but eagerly begin now that LLMs are there to guide me. It's difficult to compare times and productivity in cases like that.
This is pretty similar to my own experience using LLMs as a tool.
When I'm working with platforms/languages/frameworks I am already deeply familiar with I don't think they save me much time at all. When I've tried to use them in this context they seem to save me a bunch of time in some situations, but also cost me a bunch of time in others resulting in basically a wash as far as time saved goes.
And for me a wash isn't worth the long-term cost of losing touch with the code by not being the one to have crafted it.
But when it comes to environments I'm not intimately familiar with they can provide a very easy on-ramp that is a much more pleasant experience than trying to figure things out through often iffy technical documentation or code samples.
> search all over to figure out how to use it.
Leaflet doc is single page document with examples you can copy-paste. There is page navogation at the top. Also ctrl/cmd+f and keyword seems quicker than writing the prompt.
Nice. I'm afraid I simply assumed, like other "frameworks", it was going to entail wandering all over StackOverflow, etc.
Still, when I simply told Claude that I wanted the pins to group together when zoomed out — it immediately knew I meant "clustering" and added the proper import to the top of the HTML file ... got it done.