LLMs give you superpowers if you work on a wide range of tasks and aren't a deep expert on all of them. They aren't that great if you know the area you are working in inside and out and never stray from it.
For example, using an LLM to help you write a Dockerfile when you write Dockerfiles once a project and don't have a dedicated expert like a Deployment Engineer in your company is fantastic.
Or using an LLM to get answers faster than google for syntax errors and other minor issues is nice.
Even using LLM with careful prompting to discuss architecture tradeoffs and get its analysis (but make the final decision yourself) can be helpful.
Generally, you want to be very careful about how you constrain the LLM through prompts to ensure you keep it on a very narrow path so that it doesn't do something stupid (as LLMs are prone to do), you also often have to iterate because LLMs will occasionally do things like hallucinate APIs that don't actually exist. But even with iteration it can often make you faster.
> For example, using an LLM to help you write a Dockerfile when you write Dockerfiles once a project and don't have a dedicated expert like a Deployment Engineer in your company is fantastic.
Basically, when you understand the problem domain, you know the llm is generating crap that, as the OP says, you're unwilling to put your name on. But when it's in a domain you don't know, you forget about how crappy the LLM is normally and go with the vibe.
As long as it's a simple enough problem and it works, I'm happy. The other day I needed to do something in powershell, which I probably use twice a year. But an LLM was just able to spit out what I needed for me.
I find it's the best for that but once things get complicated, you're just arguing with the LLM, when you should have done it yourself.
I'm pretty sure I've commented this before, but it's just too ridiculous not to share again. About a year ago I needed to convert ~25k png images to webp. I happened to have them on a Windows machine, and I don't know powershell at all. I figured this would be a good thing for AI to so I asked the free version of chatGPT to write me a script to do the conversion. I was expecting a one-liner script, since I know this would be a simple bash script and there are command line tools available for this conversion on windows.
I must say, the solution was very creative. It involved using powershell to script autohotkey to open photoshop and use AHK to automate exporting each image as a webp, closing photoshop after exporting each image. I don't have a photoshop liscence, and I don't know why powershell would be needed to script another scripting tool. I also would suspect that photoshop or another Adobe tool probably has a bulk converter. But I do need to give points for originality, that is exactly the type of harebrained solution I would sarcastically suggest if I was wanting to mildly troll a coworker.
For example, using an LLM to help you write a Dockerfile when you write Dockerfiles once a project and don't have a dedicated expert like a Deployment Engineer in your company is fantastic.
Or using an LLM to get answers faster than google for syntax errors and other minor issues is nice.
Even using LLM with careful prompting to discuss architecture tradeoffs and get its analysis (but make the final decision yourself) can be helpful.
Generally, you want to be very careful about how you constrain the LLM through prompts to ensure you keep it on a very narrow path so that it doesn't do something stupid (as LLMs are prone to do), you also often have to iterate because LLMs will occasionally do things like hallucinate APIs that don't actually exist. But even with iteration it can often make you faster.