this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2025
1138 points (98.5% liked)
Technology
75682 readers
2802 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
About that "net slowdown". I think it's true, but only in specific cases. If the user already knows well how to write code, an LLM might be only marginally useful or even useless.
However, there are ways to make it useful, but it requires specific circumstances. For example, you can't be bothered to write a simple loop, you can use and LLM to do it. Give the boring routine to an LLM, and you can focus on naming the variables in a fitting way or adjusting the finer details to your liking.
Can't be bothered to look up the exact syntax for a function you use only twice a year? Let and LLM handle that, and tweak the details. Now, you didn't spend 15 minutes reading stack overflow posts that don't answer the exact question you had in mind. Instead, you spent 5 minutes on the whole thing, and that includes the tweaking and troubleshooting parts.
If you have zero programming experience, you can use an LLM to write some code for you, but prepare to spend the whole day troubleshooting something that is essentially a black box to you. Alternatively, you could ask a human to write the same thing in 5-15 minutes depending on the method they choose.
This is a sane way to use LLM. Also, pick your poison, some bots are better than others for a specific task. It's kinda fascinating to see how other people solve coding problems and that is essentially on tap with a bot, it will churn out as many examples as you want. It's a really useful tool for learning syntax and libraries of unfamiliar languages.
On one extreme side of LLM there is this insane hype and at the other extreme a great pessimism but in the middle is a nice labour saving educational tool.