I thought the value proposition of using LLMs to code is the lesser cognitive load of just describing what you want in natural language. But if it turns out writing the prompt is so involved, you end up trading snippets on forums and you often run into undefined behavior (the thing you described turned out to be ambiguous to the LLM and it gave you something you did not expect at all)...
I have to wonder, wouldn't just writing the code be more productive in the end?
Yes: if you are an expert in the area. In this case I needed something fairly specific I am far from an expert in. I know both Elixir and Rust quite well but couldn't quickly figure out how to be able to wrap a Rust object in just the right container(s) data type(s) so it can be safely accessed from any OS thread even though the object at hand is `Send` but not `Sync`. And I wanted it done without a mutex.
No: because most programming languages are just verbose. Many times I know _exactly_ what I will write 10 minutes later but I still have to type it out. If I can describe it to an LLM well enough then part of that time is saved.
Mind you, I am usually an LLM hater. They are over-glorified, they don't "reason" and they don't "understand" -- it baffles me to this day that an audience seemingly as educated as HN believes in that snake oil.
That being said, they are still a useful tool and as good engineers it's on us to recognize a tool's utility and its strong and weak usages and adapt our workflows to that. I believe me and many others do just that.
The rest... believe in forest nymphs.
So yeah. I agree that a significant part of the time it's just quicker to type it out. But people like myself are good at articulating their needs so with us it's often a coin toss. I choose to type the code out myself more often than not because (1) I don't want to pay for any LLM yet and (2) I don't want to forget my craft which I love to this day and never did it just for the money.
Difficult for me not to hate LLMs when there are literal hundreds of billions at stake and people are lying through their teeth for money, as they always do.
Which does lead to all the weird discourse around them indeed.
I have to wonder, wouldn't just writing the code be more productive in the end?