| > 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. |