[billmcneale]

That's the wrong approach.

I use chat for things I don't know how to do all the time. I might not know how to do it, but I sure know how to test that what I'm being told is correct. And as long as it's not, I iterate with the chat bot.

[WhiteNoiz3]

A better way to phrase it might be don't use it for something that you aren't able to verify or validate.

[sdesol]

I agree with this. I keep harping on this, but we are sold automation instead of a power tool. If you have domain knowledge in the problem that you are solving, then LLMs can become an extremely valuable aid.

[Salgat]

Similar to a developer who copy-pastes sections of code from StackOverflow and puts their faith in it being correct. The bigger issue with LLMs is that it's easier to be tricked into thinking you actually understand the code when your understanding may actually be quite superficial.

[zmmmmm]

I think it's just a broader definition of "know how to do". If you can write a test for it then I'm going to argue you know "how" to do it in a bigger picture sense. As in, you understand the requirements and inherent underlying technical challenges behind what you are asking to be done.

The issue is, there are always subtle aspects to problems that most developers only know by instinct. Like, "how is it doing the unicode conversion here" or "what about the case when the buffer is exactly the same size as the message, is there room for the terminating character?". You need the instincts for these to properly construct tests and review the code it did. If you do have those instincts, I argue you could write the code, it's just a lot of effort. But if you don't, I will argue you can't test it either and can't use LLMs to produce (at least) professional level code.

[bityard]

I feel like that's a good option ONLY if the code you are writing will never be deployed to an environment where security is a concern. Many security bugs in code are notoriously difficult to spot and even frequently slip through reviews from humans who are actively looking for exactly those kinds of bugs.

I suppose we could ask the question: Are LLMs better at writing secure code than humans? I'll admit I don't know the answer to that, but given what we know so far, I seriously doubt it.