I think young programmers who are less heavily invested in their skills and who haven't built a life that's highly dependent on using them are generally more interested in figuring out what programming with LLMs means.

But so are much older programmers who have seen it all, including the obsoletion of many of their skills, and who are not so dependent on continuing to use them as they could retire anyway.

It's more the middle (programmer) age senior programmers who are less likely to see any use.

I've seen the same pattern with artists' interest in generative AI.

But it's complicated because it IS also dependent on what you're doing. So it's hard to know if something is being dismissed correctly due to domain/expertise, or prematurely due to not putting the work in and figuring out what these tools mean.

This really touches on it. I'm a big advocate of these tools, but they author approximately zero lines of my code, yet I still find them invaluable and a wonderful tool to leverage, and do so constantly. Particularly in challenging projects and needs.

I suspect many who find them useless and decry them were sold an exaggerated utility and then were disappointed when they tried to generate libraries or even functions, then feeling deceived when there are errors or flaws, etc.

> I suspect many who find them useless and decry them were sold an exaggerated utility and then were disappointed when they tried to generate libraries or even functions, then feeling deceived when there are errors or flaws, etc.

No, I suspect the large majority (and this has been backed by surveys) of people that are dismissive of them are more senior and have been working in highly specific problem domains for a long time where this is rarely/never a good "general" answer for a problem, and have spent an inordinate amount of time debugging LLM-generated or LLM-Advised code by their peers that contains nefarious and subtle errors that look correct at a glance. I personally can tell you that for what I work on, in my domain, these tools have been a net time suck and not a gain, and I pretty much only use them to ask questions about documentation, which it often gets incorrect anyway (again, in subtle ways that are probably hard for someone who isn't very senior to detect).

Hope that helps.

Yes, absolutely, they’re an ideal rubber duck and I’ve come to really value them for my work. Checking your sanity, pondering how certain operations might be implemented or how they could be optimized, finding where a logic bug might be in a snippet of code…

> It's interesting that there is this division between programmers who claim LLMs are super helpful, and those saying they are useless.

My take is: if the project is doing something that has been asked a thousand times on stackoverflow and has hundreds of pages in the tutorial content mills, the LLM will tell you something reasonably meaningful about it.

I'd hazard a guess that most people overenthusiastic about those tools are gluing together javascript libs.

This is not necessarily a bad thing, we even asked a LLM today at work to generate some code for a library that we didn't know how to use but seems fairly popular, and the output looked like it would make sense. (Can't tell you how it ended up because I wasn't the one implementing the thing.)

However, we also spent 2 hours in a group debugging session because we're working on a completely custom codebase that isn't documented anywhere on geeksforgeeks, stackoverflow or anywhere else public. I highly doubt that even a local LLM would be able to help, and no way this code is leaving the premises.

>if the project is doing something that has been asked a thousand times

There are many billions of lines of high-quality, commented code online, covering just about everything. Millions of projects. All of Linux. All of Android. All of PGSQL and SQLite and MySQL and Apache and Git and OpenSSL and countless encryption libraries and countless data tools, video and audio manipulation, and...

Every single project is absolutely dominated by things that have been done many, many thousands of times. The vast bulk of your projects have zero novelty. They're mixing the same ingredients in different ways. I would think any experienced developer would realize this.

>I'd hazard a guess that most people overenthusiastic about those tools are gluing together javascript libs.

At this point it's comedy how often this "oh I understand that the noobs get value from this, but not us Advanced Programmers". It's absurdist and honestly at this point I just shake my head. My day is filled with C++, Python, Rust, Go, the absolute cutting edge of AI research, and I find these tools absolutely invaluable now. They are a massive accelerator. Zero JavaScript libs or "LOL WEB DEV" programming in my life.

Yes, you mentioned those things that are documented everywhere. I do use LLMs to give me skeleton code for those parts I'm not familiar with.

How about a full equivalent of Qt that is proprietary and has absolutely nothing public in it? How is a LLM going to help with that? There is no public info anywhere.

> the absolute cutting edge of AI research

No offense but there are billions of public pages about "AI" research since it's the new gold rush. Of course LLMs have material about all your libs.

>but there are billions of public pages about "AI" research

Billions? For many of the things I am working on there are zero public pages outside of research papers. I said nothing about working with libs. Again, I'm not asking an AI "here's my project now finish it", I'm working with AIs for the countless little programming challenges and needs. Things that mirror things done in many, many other projects, most having nothing to do with my domain.

As an aside, starting that with "no offense" as an attempt to make it insulting is...weird.

I feel like this discussion is taking place ten years ago. The weird reference to StackOverflow is particularly funny.

Some people seem to be taking me saying "you must work on boring code" as a judgement against them as developers, and it isn't. I'm speaking directly from my experience: If I asked it beginner-tier questions about how to do X in Y language, it would get those right quite often. I could see Copilot being very useful if you're breaking into a new language, or just knocking the rust off the gears of one in your head.

And like, even for those who write a lot of boring code, like... cool man. I don't judge people for that. We need all code written and all code is not exciting, novel, or interesting and there's nothing wrong with doing it. Someone's gotta.

I'm just saying that the further up the proverbial complexity chain I went, the less able Copilot was. And once I was quite in the weeds, it seemed utterly perplexed and frankly, not worth the time in asking.

>as a judgement against them as developers

No one takes it as a judgment, and no one is offended. It's just a truth that when people make such claims, they're often exaggerating the uniqueness or novelty of what they're doing.

You described your work in another comment, and what you described is the most bog standard programming in the field. It's always the case.

Yeah, at least 90% of any job is just making license plates. I have worked on both very complex and challenging code and also very simple and easy code in my career, even within one job.