Yeah, sorry...I re-read the comment and realized I wasn't being clear. It's bigger than just search/replace. Already updated what I wrote.
The far more common situation is that I'm refactoring something, and I realize that I want to make some change to the semantics or signature of a method (say, the return value), and now I can't just use search w/o also validating the context of every change. That's annoying, and today's bots do a great job of just handling it.
Another one, I just did a second ago: "I think this method X is now redundant, but there's a minor difference between it, and method Y. Can I remove it?"
Bot went out, did the obvious scan for all references to X, but then evaluated each call context to see if I could use Y instead.
(But even in the case of search & replace, I've had my butt saved a few times by agent when it caught something I wasn't considering....)
I really like working with LLMs but one thing I've noticed is that the obvious transformation of "extract this functionality into a helper function and then apply that throughout the codebase" is one I really actually enjoy doing myself; replacing 15 lines of boilerplate-y code in a couple dozen places with a single helper call is _really_ satisfying; it's like my ASMR.
Hah, well, to each their own. That's exactly the kind of thing that makes me want to go outside and take a walk.
Regardless of what your definition of horrible and boring happens to be, just being able to tell the bot to do a horrible boring thing and having it done with like a junior level intelligence is so experience enhancing that it makes coding more fun.
I find elimination of inertia and preservation of momentum to be the biggest wins; it's just that my momentum isn't depleted by extracting something out into a helper.
People should try this kind of coding a couple times just because it's an interesting exercise in figuring out what parts of coding are important to you.
The far more common situation is that I'm refactoring something, and I realize that I want to make some change to the semantics or signature of a method (say, the return value), and now I can't just use search w/o also validating the context of every change. That's annoying, and today's bots do a great job of just handling it.
Another one, I just did a second ago: "I think this method X is now redundant, but there's a minor difference between it, and method Y. Can I remove it?"
Bot went out, did the obvious scan for all references to X, but then evaluated each call context to see if I could use Y instead.
(But even in the case of search & replace, I've had my butt saved a few times by agent when it caught something I wasn't considering....)