I got excited about LLM agents thinking it was just about "faster typing". A lot of us have dreamed of a day where we can just transfer what we have in mind directly into the computer, skipping the laborious manual keying step. But using an LLM is not that. It's not that at all.
Instead they let you type vague or ambiguous crap in and just essentially guess about the unclear bits. Hadn't quite thought through which algorithm to use? No worries, the LLM will just pick one. Hadn't considered an edge case? No worries, the LLM will just write 100 lines of code that no sane programmer would ever go through with before realising something isn't right.
I've made the mistake of being that senior who is way too eager to help juniors many times in my career. What happens is they never, ever learn for themselves. They never learn how to digest and work through a problem. They never learn from their mistakes. Because they can always just defer to me. LLMs are the worst thing to happen for these people because unlike a real person like me the LLM is never busy, never grumpy and nobody is taking notes of just how many times they're having to ask.
LLMs are really useful at generating boilerplate, but you have to ask yourself why you're spending your days writing boilerplate in the first place. The danger is it can very quickly become more than just boilerplate and before you know it you've forgotten how to think for yourself.
Sometimes avoiding boilerplate is out of scope. I’m currently using an LLM agent to write a Home Assistant integration. The LLM is happy to write boilerplate crap to interact with the terrible Home Assistant API without complaining about it. Sure, some of the code it writes is awful, and I can fix that. (The record was about 15 lines of code, including non-functional error handling, to compute the fixed number zero.)
Becoming proficient at banging out Home Assistant entities and their utterly ludicrous instantiation process has zero value for my career.
Instead they let you type vague or ambiguous crap in and just essentially guess about the unclear bits. Hadn't quite thought through which algorithm to use? No worries, the LLM will just pick one. Hadn't considered an edge case? No worries, the LLM will just write 100 lines of code that no sane programmer would ever go through with before realising something isn't right.
I've made the mistake of being that senior who is way too eager to help juniors many times in my career. What happens is they never, ever learn for themselves. They never learn how to digest and work through a problem. They never learn from their mistakes. Because they can always just defer to me. LLMs are the worst thing to happen for these people because unlike a real person like me the LLM is never busy, never grumpy and nobody is taking notes of just how many times they're having to ask.
LLMs are really useful at generating boilerplate, but you have to ask yourself why you're spending your days writing boilerplate in the first place. The danger is it can very quickly become more than just boilerplate and before you know it you've forgotten how to think for yourself.