So, in my professional work environment, which is a complex C++ app with long build times and lots of proprietary domain-specific knowledge, LLMs were worse than useless. Not totally surprising, but I originally had hopes for something like Cursor being useful in terms of simplifying the process of large mechanical refactors, which it decidedly wasn't. It could suggest interesting and complex uses of C++ templates, but its application were very slop-adjacent, and even for less complex refactors it would attempt and fall apart in the "check" part of the "guess and check" loop, probably because of the whole "long build times" thing. So we're still paying for visual assist and just wishing it had more (and more specific!) kinds of mechanical refactors available.

for personal projects (more polyglot but rust, js, python, and random shell scripts are bigger and more important here) it's been more mixed to positive; and this is (i think?) in part because i have the luxury of writing off things I'm _not actually_ interested in doing. maintaining cmake files sucks, and the free tier of Cursor does a good enough job of it. I have a few small plugins/extensions for things like blender, and again, I don't know enough to do a good job there, and the benefit of making something extremely specific to what i need without actually knowing what's going on under the hood works fine: I can just verify the results, and that's good enough. but then, conversely, it's made it _wayyyy_ harder to pick and verify third party libraries for the things i do care about? I'll look something up and it'll either be 100% AI vibe coded and not good enough to sneeze at, or it'll be fine, but the documentation is 100% AI generated and likewise, I would rather just have the version of this library before AI ever existed.

more and more I'm convinced LLM agents are only fit for purpose for things that don't need to be good or consistent, but that there is actually a viable niche of things that don't need to be good that it can nicely slot into. That's still not worth $20/month to me, though. and it's absolutely ruining the online commons in a way that makes it hard to feel good about.

(my understanding of claude code is that it's a non-interactive agent, which is worse for what i have in mind. iteration and _changing my mind_ are a big part of my process, so even if I let the computer do its own thing for an hour and work on something else, that's less productive than spending even 10 minutes of focused time on the same thing.)