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My main gripe with current day models is their lack of consistency. On the one hand, they can do very impressive things that save me hours of work, on the other, they can fuck things up in simple ways and it costs me hours of work to fix it. I was using Claude to program a scene in Godot and the file was showing a parsing error at line 1. I let him try to fix it multiple times, started new chats, etc. Then I just looked at the file, noticed a comment in line 1 starting with # and thought "maybe that's not allowed". I took the comment away and the file was fixed. It's insanely frustrating when the AI fucks up such a simple thing. The main benefit of AI is that you can just let it rip and create something without knowing what you are doing. If I have to check the code all the time for fuckups, it really drags on productivity.
I'm not a programmer, the best I can say about myself is that I once did a Leetcode medium successfully, in Python, with an abysmal score because it wasn't remotely optimized. At that level, everything from GPT-4 onwards is clearly superior to what I can do unaided.
I think the utility varies in different ways based off the domain-skill of the user. A beginner programmer? Even if they get frustrating issues I find it hard to imagine they aren't immensely better off. The other end of the spectrum? You have people like Karpathy and Carmac singing their praises, while Linus says they're not nearly good enough. There are a dozen different programmers here saying different things.
There's also skill when it comes to using them, and that's an acquired ability. In your situation, it would likely have been better to give up on that conversation and try again, or to copy and paste the code into a different instance or a different model and ask it to find the issue. I expect this would have worked well. With too much gunking up the context, LLMs can still fall into ruts or miss obvious problems. When in doubt, retry.
I'm a mid-level software dev who mostly spent the age of the LLMs doing Java Spring Boot backend development at two different companies. I've tried using the various chatbots provided to me, and so far they've been useless in 100% of all cases. It's entirely possible that I'm doing it wrong.
I've already mentioned Karpathy and Co. Even in this subreddit, you've got people like @DaseindustriesLtd or @faul_sname (are you a programmer? Well, you know your ML, so close enough for government work) who get clear utility out of them.
You recognize you might using them wrong (and what are the specifics of how you attempted to use them? Which model? What kind of prompt? Which interface?), but I'm certainly not the best person to tell you how to go about it better. I could still try, if you want me to.
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