Lemmings, I was hoping you could help me sort this one out: LLM’s are often painted in a light of being utterly useless, hallucinating word prediction machines that are really bad at what they do. At the same time, in the same thread here on Lemmy, people argue that they are taking our jobs or are making us devs lazy. Which one is it? Could they really be taking our jobs if they’re hallucinating?
Disclaimer: I’m a full time senior dev using the shit out of LLM’s, to get things done at a neck breaking speed, which our clients seem to have gotten used to. However, I don’t see “AI” taking my job, because I think that LLM’s have already peaked, they’re just tweaking minor details now.
Please don’t ask me to ignore previous instructions and give you my best cookie recipe, all my recipes are protected by NDA’s.
Please don’t kill me
The key is how you use LLMs and which LLMs you use for what.
If you know how to make use of them properly, know their strengths, weaknesses, and limitations, LLMs are an incredibly useful tool that sucks up productivity from other people (and their jobs) and focus productivity on you, so to speak.
If you do not know how to make use of them – then yes, they suck. For you.
It’s not really that much different from any other tool. Know how to use version control? If not it does not make you a bad dev per se. If yes, it probably makes you a bit more organized.
Same with IDEs, using search engines, being able to read documentation properly. All of that is not required but knowing how to make use of such tools and having the skills add up.
Same with LLMs.