In coding but also generally with deep expertise in other fields too, I find LLMs help only if you deal with them adversarially. You can quickly get its stabs on the current state of topics or opinions about your ideas, but you’ve got to fight it to get to better quality. It tends to give you first the generic crap, then you battle it to get to really interesting insights. Knowing what to fight it on is the key to getting to the good stuff.
This is it. Always be distrustful and challenge the LLM. That along with providing ample context and guiding it towards a solution you have in mind at a high level is the trick to make LLM assisted coding work really well.
And once you're in that groove, and have built the intuition on what works and what doesn't and where you should challenge or follow up, productivity really goes up quite a bit.
To quote Memento: "Don't believe his lies." (though thankfully, as the LLMs advance, this is becoming less of an issue. Claude 3.5 Sonnet V2 is already a huge step ahead compared to where it once was).
So for example if it responded with something like this to me, I would point out Clever Hans the trick horse that answered math questions was giving the specific answer the trainer provided, but an LLM is yielding well-structured content it was trained on that me the prompter is trying to get out that I haven’t seen before. I know what it does not look like and I know pieces of what it does. So no not the same.
Then the LLM would take this and redo its answer. Unlike internet strangers, who usually respond unhelpfully to adversarial exchanges because they tend to be too fixated, for my purposes, on finding ways to make their original answer right.
