chapotraphouse

It is very useful for coding because that is one of the few places where unoriginal repetitive solutions are often desirable. But even with coding you have to know what to tell the LLM to do and you have to be able to read and understand the output to make sure it works as intended.

LLM's are a useful too for programmers to automate repetitive tasks but it is nowhere near bearing able to produce usable applications by itself. I am not worried that I'll be replaced by a robot anytime soon.

Those who should be worried about their jobs are people in places like customer support or government services directed at people who doesn't matter to the ruling class. In these cases the powers that be have little holding them from replacing human interactions with significantly worse interactions with a LLM. Nobody important gives a shit if some schmuck can't cancel their cable subscription or gets their employment benefits cut because the computer had a hiccup.

IMO no, for two reasons:

• reading code is harder than writing it. If the AI writes you a standard implementation, you still have to read it to make sure it's correct. So that's more work than just doing it yourself
• AI will produce code that looks right. Since it can't understand anything that's all it does, next most likely token == most correct-looking solution. But when the obvious solution is not the right one, you now have deceptively incorrect code, specifically and solely designed to look correct.

I've never used Copilot myself but pair programmed with someone who used it, and it seemed like he spent more time messing with the output than it would have taken to write it himself.

More like helping programmers write e-mails to needy project managers who need a status update on that feature ticket every 11 hemiseconds

I use JetBrains "local LLM" thingy and it's good at suggesting the very obvious, trivial code that I would write anyway, so it just saves me keystrokes

It's clearly become a crutch for some programmers. I remember talking to someone who does ai research and openly admitted that most of the people in their lab couldn't code and that the outputs from chatgpt where sufficient to do their work.