Maybe I've been using it for the wrong things—it certainly never helps unblock me when I'm stuck like it sounds like it does for some (I suspect it's because when I get stuck it's deep in undocumented rabbit holes), but it sounds like it might be decent at large-scale rote refactoring? Aside from specialized editors, how do people use it for things like that?
You take Claude, you create a new Project, in your Project you explain the context of what you are doing and what you are programming (you have to explain it only once!).
If you have specific technical documentation (e.g. rare programming language, your own framework, etc), you can put it there in the project.
Then you create a conversation, and copy-paste the source-code for your file, and ask for your refactoring or improvement.
If you are lazy just say: "give me the full code"
and then
"continue the code" few times in a row
and you're done :)
When you say this, you mean typing out some text somewhere? Where do you do this? In a giant comment? In which file?
Don't ask short one-off questions and expect it to work (it might just, depending on what you ask, but probably not if you're deep on some proprietary code base with no traces in the LLMs pretraining).
I'm trying to figure out if I'm using it wrong or using it on the wrong types of problems. How do people with 10+ years of experience use it effectively?
Then when I have a bunch of wrong answers, I can give those as context as well to the model and make it avoid those pitfalls. At that point my constraints for the problem are so rigorous that the LLMs lands at the correct solution and frankly writes out the code 100x faster than I would. And I’m an advanced vim user who types at 155 wpm.
See, it's comments like this that make me suspect that I'm working on a completely different class of problem than the people who find value in interacting with LLMs.
I'm a very fast typer, but I've never bothered to find out how fast because the speed of my typing has never been the bottleneck for my work. The bottleneck is invariably thinking through the problem that I'm facing, trying to understand API docs, and figuring out how best to organize my work to communicate to future developers what's going on.
Copilot is great at saving me large amounts of keystrokes here and there, which is nice for avoiding RSI and occasionally (with very repetitive code like unit tests) actually a legit time saver. But try as I might I can't get useful output out of the chat models that actually speeds up my workflow.
If you're an experienced dev, having a peer that enthusiastically suggests a bunch of plausible but subtly wrong things probably net-net slows you down and annoys you. If you're more junior, it's more like being shown a world of possibilities that opens your mind and seems much more useful.
Anyway, I think the reason we see so much enthusiasm for LLM coding assistants right now is the overall skew of developers to being more junior. I'm sure these tools will eventually get better, at least I hope they do because there's going to be a whole lot of enthusiastically written but questionable code out there soon that will need to be fixed and there probably won't be enough human capacity to fix it all.