People are skeptical of LLMs because the experiences they’ve had with LLMs. You can’t blog your way out those experiences.

I’m skeptical because I’ve seen this exact situation and I’ve seen the result be something that anyone experienced wouldn’t do.

Sometimes I think folks having ‘experiences’ should play more poker.

The point is, it’s a game of chance and yet good players beat bad players in the long run. Your job in the new era of software engineering is to design the process so LLMs doing your code monkeying avoid the losses (including discarding bad changes) and take the wins. Win often enough and you’ll come out ahead.

Hmm you have written it in a way that gives me a new line of thinking.

I think what you are saying is that people should learn and appreciate working in high variance environments and still exploit small gains. This is clearly not something that is easily digestible to people so they end up rejecting LLMs.

that's a very dangerous analogy, because you would be considered the domain expert and you are just asking for synonyms for something you already know but may not remember off-hand.

now, what if you asked for the synonym for "provides" in a language that has gender differences (e.g. spanish/portuguese) as well as societal nuances (e.g. japanese) and it gives you "confers", how would you now know that's correct?

ah, so you say you tell it to take into consideration gender differences, as well as societal nuances. What are those, if you were not already familiar with the language?

You are pushing the limits of my framework and it’s a good thing.

The extent to which LLMs help is determined by how well acquainted you are with the domain. But it will always push you directionally in the right direction.

In your case, you used a language example and this is one where LLMs have natural strength in. I don’t need to be an expert in Spanish to trust it because I know that LLMs are specifically good at catching these problems.

But again there are limits and good to understand it.