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You can curb an LLM into doing what you want. Unfortunately people don't have the patience or the skill.

People who have skill can do the same without LLMs, maybe slightly slower on average but on more predictable schedule.

I wouldn’t say slightly slower; LLMs are massively useful for software engineering in the right hands.

For some personal projects I still stick to the basics and write everything by hand though. It’s kinda nice and grounding; and almost feels like a detox.

For any new software engineer, I’m a strong advocate of zero LLM use (except maybe as a stack overflow alternative) for your first few months.

It's significantly slower to use LLMs for some things. The only thing it excels at is generic, broad tasks. Getting the 90% done. I find that it's less cumbersome to get it mostly right and touch it up yourself than to prompt over details like syntax.

The chat UX with a fake-human lying to you and framing things emotionally really doesn’t help. And it is pretty much not possible to get away from it, or at least I haven’t found yet how.

I would love to see a model trained to behave way more like a tool instead of auto-completing from Reddit language patterns…

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