One of my favorite ways to use LLM agents for coding is to have them write extensive documentation on whatever I'm about to dig in coding on. Pretty low stakes if the LLM makes a few mistakes. It's perhaps even a better place to start for skeptics.
LLMs can generate content but not really write, out of the box they tend to be quote verbose and generate a lot of proforma content. Perhaps with the right kind of prompts, a lot of editing and reviews, you can get them to good, but at the point it is almost same as writing it yourself.
It is a hard choice between lower quality documentation (AI slop?) or it being lightly or fully undocumented. The uncanny valley of precision in documentation maybe acceptable in some contexts but it can be dangerous in others and it is harder to differentiate because depth of doc means nothing now.
Over time we find ourselves skipping LLM generated documentation just like any other AI slop. The value/emphasis placed on reading documentation erodes that finding good documentation becomes harder like other online content today and get devalued.
And I find that even the auto-generated stuff tends to go up at least a bit in terms of level of abstraction than staring at the code itself, and helps you more like a "sparknotes" version of the code, so that when you dig in yourself you have an outline/roadmap.
Even worse, the model you let it build in your head of the space it describes can lead to chains of incorrect reasoning that waste time and make debugging Sisyphean.
Like there is some value there, but I wonder how much of it is just (my own) feelings, and whether I'm correctly accounting for the fact that I'm being confidently lied to by a damn computer on a regular basis.
Many of us who grew up being young and naive on the internet in the 90s/early 00s, kind of learnt not to trust what strangers tell us on the internet. I'm pretty my first "Press ALT+F4 to enter noclip" from a multiplayer lobby set me up to be able to deal with LLMs effectively, because it's the same as if someone on HN writes about something like it's "The Truth".
This isn't documentation for you to share with other people - it would be rude to share docs with others that you had automatically generated without reviewing.
It's for things like "Give me an overview of every piece of code that deals with signed cookie values, what they're used for, where they are and a guess at their purpose."
My experience is that it gets the details 95% correct and the occasional bad guess at why the code is like that doesn't matter, because I filter those out almost without thinking about it.
Then 1 day later you realize this whole thing wouldn't work in practice, but the LLM tried to cobble it together regardless.
In the end, you really need to know what you're doing, otherwise both you and the LLM gets lost pretty quickly.