[chipdart]

> I am unable to get these things to do anything useful.

My experience is widely different than yours. I use Copilot extensively to explain aspects of codebases, generate documentation, and even fill in boilerplate code for automated tests. You need to provide the right context with the right system prompts, which needs some effort from your end, and you cannot expect perfect outputs.

In the end it's like any software developer tool: you need to learn how to use it, and when it makes sense to do so. That needs some continuous effort from your end to work your way up to a proficient level.

> People on this site love to talk about “muh productivity!”, but always stop short of saying what they got from this productivity boost: (...)

I don't understand what you're trying to say. I mean, have you ever asked that type of loaded question on discussions on googling for answers, going to Stack Overflow, or even posting questions on customer support pages?

But to answer your question, I spend far less time troubleshooting, reading code to build up context, and even googling for topics or browsing stack overflow. I was able to gather requirements, design whole systems, and put together proofs of concept requiring far less iterations than what I would otherwise have to go through. This means less drudge work, with all the benefits to quality of life that this brings.

[joblemblem]

These services retain historical records of interactions.

Can you show me an example of successfully doing what you claim you do?

[williamcotton]

This is a WIP, but here's the test suite for a recursive decent powered search DSL:

https://github.com/williamcotton/search-query-parser-scratch...

Claude, using Projects, wrote perhaps 90% of this project with my detailed guidance.

It does a double pass, the first pass recursive descent to get strings as leaf nodes and then another pass to get multiple errors reported at once.

There's also a React component for a search input box powered by Monaco and complete with completions, error underlines and messaging, and syntax highlighting:

https://github.com/williamcotton/search-query-parser-scratch...

Feel free to browse the commit history to get an idea of how much time this saved me. Spoiler alert: it saved a lot of time. Frankly, I wouldn't have bothered with this project without offloading most of the work to an LLM.

There's a lot more than this and if you want a demo you can:

  git clone [e-mail]:williamcotton/search-query-parser-scratchpad.git
  cd search-input-query-react
  npm install
  npm run dev

Put something like this into the input:

  -status:out price:<130 (sneakers or shoes)

And then play around with valid and invalid syntax.

It has Sqlite WASM running in the browser with demo data so you'll get some actual results.

If you want a guided video chat tour of how I used the tool I'd be happy to arrange that. It takes too much work to get things out of Claude.

[malux85]

> These services retain historical records of interactions.

Thats not universally true, for example AWS hosts their own version of Claude specifically for non-retention and guarantee that your data and requests are not used for training. This is legally backed up and governments and banks use this version to guarantee that submitted queries are not retained.

I’m a developer with about the same amount of experience as you (22 years) and LLMs are incredibly useful to me, but only really as an advanced tab completion (I use paid version of cursor with the latest Claude model) and it easily 5x’s my productivity. The most benefit comes from refactoring code where I change one line, the llm detects what I’m doing and then updates all the other lines in the file. Could I do this manually? Yes absolutely, but it just turned a 2 minute activity into (literally) a 2 second activity.

These micro speed ups have a benefit of time for sure, but there’s a WAY, WAAAY larger benefit: my momentum stays up because I’m not getting cognitively fatigued doing trivialities.

Do I read and check what the llm writes? Of course.

Does it make mistakes? Sometimes, but until I have access to the all-knowing perfect god machine I’m doing cost benefit on the imperfect one, and it’s still worth it A LOT.

And no, I don’t write SPA TODO apps, I am the founder of a quantum chemistry startup, LLMs write a lot of our helpers, deployment code, review our scientific experiments and help us brainstorm, write our documentation, tests and much more. The whole company uses them and they are all more productive by doing so.

How do we know it works? We just hit experimental parity and labs have verified that our simulations match predictions with a negligible margin of error. Could we have built this without LLMs? Yes sure, but we did it in 4.5 months, I estimate it would have taken at least 12 without them -

Again - do they make mistakes? Yes, but who doesn’t? The benefits FAR outweigh the negatives.

[chipdart]

> Can you show me an example of successfully doing what you claim you do?

In theory technically nothing prevents me from doing that, but I use it for professional work. Do you understand what you're asking?