What do you mean by that? In my experience they mostly help when you are doing mainstream, well-trodden work for which a company’s/project’s/domain’s inside knowledge isn’t needed. Maybe you mean the latter by “novel”?
Varied and novel to the programmer. If you're doing the same thing day in and day out it probably isn't much use. If you're like many programmers and you're jumping between libraries and languages and platforms and APIs and domains and spheres, it's immensely helpful.
>doing mainstream, well-trodden work for which a company’s/project’s/domain’s inside knowledge isn’t needed
A core disconnect in this discussion is that many people seem to be arguing from the position of "I tried to generate whole solutions with these tools and it failed, so it's useless".
Everything is well-trodden. One of the commentators in here, who declares themselves a unique snowflake where these tools are useless, does "sockets with encryption and messaging", which is some of the most well-trodden ground in this domain. Everything is glue. Everything is a lot of relatively simple things strung together. And for all of those, portions are helped and accelerated with these tools.
Everyone is working in unique domains and spaces with weird rules and restrictions and needs. The whole point of the special snowflake comment is specifically that people aren't remotely unique in being a special snowflake.
And the Luddism argument isn't "name-calling", it's an observation of an absolute truth on here.
Everything is extremely well-trodden at the code level. You're taking some inputs and generating some outputs. You're calling some functions. You're manipulating some strings or lists or sets. You're sorting some things or filtering things. You're building a client to a given API. You're doing some messaging and some encryption.
I guarantee that your code isn't remotely as unique or novel as you think it is. Of course on here everyone is 240lbs, 6'2" and benches 350, and their magically novel, super unique code is just too secret. So everyone's special.
If you had to explain the domain and context to these tools, you might be using them wrong.
Can you imagine even in principle a piece of evidence that would convince you otherwise?
And yes, in the end all code distills down to shit that is very similar to the countless billions of lines of code on the internet. Everything -- every single project that anyone on this site is working on -- is a bunch of glued together shit where 90% (more like 99% Probably 99.9%) of it is in common with code seen in countless other projects. Utterly regardless of domain or business or project specific uniqueness. Someone would have to be profoundly incompetent to not realize this.
Again, I seem to arguing with people who think that using a tool means feeding it their whole projects and having it rewrite it in Rust or something. In reality a programmer could yield immense value from such tools having a) given it zero lines of their code, b) used zero lines of the code it generated. This isn't a difficult concept, but I'm going to continue getting insane responses by all of the unique people who work on the amazingly unique situations where instead of sorting from A-Z, they sort from Z-A!
> In reality a programmer could yield immense value from such tools having a) given it zero lines of their code, b) used zero lines of the code it generated.
We simply have different experiences of life! I think with the advent of Claude 3.5 Sonnet the LLMs have just about edged out ahead in terms of time saved vs time wasted, for me, but before Sonnet I'm fairly confident they were moderately net negative for me.
Can you give some concrete examples of where they've helped you this dramatically? With links to chat logs? I still don't understand how people are finding them so useful, and I keep asking people and they keep not providing chat logs so I can see what they're doing.
If someone can't use these tools for security or propriety reasons, that's an obvious hard restriction. But saying "oh my code is just too unique, my skills too advanced" is self-deluding nonsense.
>I think with the advent of Claude 3.5 Sonnet the LLMs
We are talking about now. The present. I'm stating the value of these tools now. Their state in the past is irrelevant.
>Can you give some concrete examples
Sorry, NDAs, secret code, secret projects, et al
> Their state in the past is irrelevant.
Apparently also their state in the present? I said "just about edged out ahead", whereas you say "immense value".
I find a number of models fantastically useful in the present. I'm not sure why your one day evaluation of them is relevant to how I utilize them.
It was inevitable that someone was going to do the "but I insist upon writing in some fringe language" bit (when the "my project and domain is too unique" bit faltered), but many models actually have excellent F# abilities. Eh.
> many models actually have excellent F# abilities
Name three? As I said, I badly want this stuff to work!
And of course Github Copilot autocomplete works well just as it does for most other languages.
Even the best programmers have very narrow skills relative to the whole field.
Yeah, I've used 20+ languages and hundreds of technologies and a variety of different types of product and can pick things up quickly. But it's still a drop in the bucket of technologies you can use and types of problem you can solve.
Programmer skills are deep but narrow. LLM skills are shallow but wide. It's an excellent complement for any programmer working outside their deep+narrow expertise.