Comment by bluefirebrand
4 days ago
No, you're not alone
I find it wastes my time more than it helps
Everyone insists I must be using it wrong
I was never arrogant enough to think I'm a superior coder to many people, but AI code is so bad and the experience using it is so tedious that I'm starting to seriously question the skills of anyone who finds themselves more productive using AI for code instead of writing it themselves
Agreed, but I'm also open to the likely possibility that LLMs genuinely work quite well in a few niches that I don't happen to work in, like writing run-of-the-mill React components where open source training data is truly abundant.
In day to day work I could only trust it to help me with the most conventional problems that the average developer experiences in the "top N" most popular programming languages and frameworks, but I don't need help with that because search engines are faster and lead to more trustworthy results.
I turn to LLMs when I have a problem that I can't solve after at least 10 minutes of my own research, which probably means I've strayed off the beaten path a bit. This is where response quality goes down the drain. The LLM now succumbs to hallucinations and bad pattern-matching like disregarding important details, suggesting solutions to superficially similar problems, parroting inapplicable conventional wisdoms, and summarizing the top 5 google search results and calling it "deep research".
> LLMs genuinely work quite well in a few niches that I don't happen to work in, like writing run-of-the-mill React components where open source training data is truly abundant
I write run of the mill React components quite often and this has not been my experience with AI either so I really don't know what gives
Agreed.
perhaps 1% of the time I've asked an LLM to write code for me, has it given me something useful and not taken more time than just writing the thing myself.
It has happened, but those instances are vastly outnumbered by it spewing out garbage that I would be professionally embarrassed to ever commit into a repo, and/or me repeatedly screaming at it "no, dumbass, I already told you why that isn't a solution to the problem"