The comic is only accurate if you expect it do everything for you, you're bad at communicating, and you're using an old model. Or if you're just unlucky

I point blank refuse to use them. I've seen how they've affected my coworker and my boss - these two people now simply cannot read documentation, do not trust their own abilities to write code, and cannot debug anything that they write. My job has become more difficult since this shit started being pushed on us all.

they suck

Yeah kinda. I ask it to do something simple like create a a typescript interface for some JSON and it just gives me what I want... most of the time.

Other times it will explain to me what JSON is, what Typescript is, what interfaces are and how they're used, blah blah, and somewhere in there there's the code I actually wanted. Once it helpfully commented the code... in Korean. Even when it works and comments things in English the comments can be kinda useless since it doesn't actually know what I'm doing.

It's trying to give you what you want but can sometimes get confused about what you're asking for and give a bunch of stuff you didn't actually want. So yeah, the comic is accurate... on occasion. But many times LLMs will give good results, and it's getting better, so it'll mostly work ok for simple requests. But yeah, sometimes it'll give you a lot more stuff than what you wanted.

I use llms to write small scripts because I'm too lazy to learn bash and ms cmd and regex and so far have not ruined anything.

They're okay for tasks which are reasonably a single file. I use them for simple Python scripts since they generally spit out something very similar to what I'd write, just faster. However there is a tipping point where a task becomes too complex and they fall on their face and it becomes faster to write the code yourself.

I'm never going to pay for AI, so I'm really just burning the AI company's money as I do it, too.

It's sometimes useful, often obnoxious, sometimes both.

It tends to shine on very blatantly obvious boilerplate stuff that is super easy, but tedious. You can be sloppy with your input and it will fix it up to be reasonable. Even then you've got to be careful, as sometimes what seems blatantly obvious still gets screwed up in weird ways. Even with mistakes, it's sometimes easier to edit that going from scratch.

Using an enabled editor that looks at your activity and suggests little snippets is useful, but can be really annoying when it gets particularly insistent on a bad suggestion and keeps nagging you with "hey look at this, you want to do this right?"

Overall it's merely mildly useful to me, as my career has been significantly about minimizing boilerplate with decent success. However for a lot of developers, there's a ton of stupid boilerplate, owing to language design, obnoxiously verbose things, and inscrutable library documentation. I think that's why some developers are scratching their heads wondering what the supposed big deal is and why some think it's an amazing technology that has largely eliminated the need for them to manually code.

I find you get much better results if you talk to the LLM like you were instructing a robot, not a human. That means being very specific about everything.

It's the difference between, "I would like water" and, "I would like a glass filled with drinking water and a few cubes of ice mixed in".

Much like Amazon has an incentive to not show you the specific thing it knows you're searching for, people theorize that these interfaces are designed to burn through your tokens.

The only thing I trust it with is refactoring for readability and writing scripts. But I also despise LLMs, so that's all I'd give them.

I don't know what restaurants you go to, but during my adult life not once "water please" failed to get me a glass of water.

Sometimes the waiter asks if bottled or tap, but thats about it.

I definitely often say water, usually because of the way it's asked, usually something like "What would you like to drink today?"

So it's usually just "water" or "I'll have water" or whatever drink in response. Glass of water sounds odd in response to me, especially since sometimes it's green tea which usually wouldn't come in a glass. Or coffee, etc

Wdym it's imported Egyptian water

Hey now french expensive water is really good though! How expensive is it where you live? I get a big (75cl?) bottle of st Pellegrino for like 3.50€ here in France.

Some days it will be but other days it won't be. Most of the time it can save me typing because it'll do what I want. Sometimes (for similar tasks in the same context) it's just be completely off. Once it helpfully commented my code... in Korean.

LLMs are like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're gonna get.

Frankly, I don't think you seriously tested anything that you've mentioned here.

Nobody's using Qwen because it doesn't do tool calls. Nobody really uses ollama for useful workloads because they don't own the hardware to make it good enough.

That's not to say that I don't want self-hosted models to be good. I absolutely do. But let's be realistic here.