I treat LLMs just as a fancier keyboard for near-boilerplate. When I give a prompt I know what I want them to output, cycle completions until I get a snippet that looks close enough to my liking, then edit it to fit. Super helpful.
Another use case was learning a language and SDKs I've never even dabbled with before (Swift and WatchKit). It generated awful architecture (that I think even a junior developer would realize as stinky) and it had limited knowledge about recent Swift language features (async), but gave me just-good-enough samples to get me started - better than a book could have. Can't say I learned Swift that way (didn't need to) but I made a tiny WatchOS app for personal use over in a single evening because LLM gave me a good boost.
And then, LLMs can be just a better autocompleters - it feels nice when you get all arguments correctly listed before you even type the first letter, because LLM had guessed it right from the names (it doesn't always happen, of course).
I can imagine that being too lazy and just blindly accepting LLM completions without thinking or double-checking can be a bad habit, but that sounds more like a risk for a junior than a senior.
I treat LLMs just as a fancier keyboard for near-boilerplate. When I give a prompt I know what I want them to output, cycle completions until I get a snippet that looks close enough to my liking, then edit it to fit. Super helpful.
Another use case was learning a language and SDKs I've never even dabbled with before (Swift and WatchKit). It generated awful architecture (that I think even a junior developer would realize as stinky) and it had limited knowledge about recent Swift language features (async), but gave me just-good-enough samples to get me started - better than a book could have. Can't say I learned Swift that way (didn't need to) but I made a tiny WatchOS app for personal use over in a single evening because LLM gave me a good boost.
And then, LLMs can be just a better autocompleters - it feels nice when you get all arguments correctly listed before you even type the first letter, because LLM had guessed it right from the names (it doesn't always happen, of course).
I can imagine that being too lazy and just blindly accepting LLM completions without thinking or double-checking can be a bad habit, but that sounds more like a risk for a junior than a senior.