| > They might not know the exact problem or language, but they should know enough to guide the LLM. I was in this exact situation. I worked with an unfamiliar area with a hardware SDK in C that I needed to rewrite for my runtime, or at least call its C functions from my runtime, or at least understand how the poorly written (but working) example SDK invocation works in C by commenting it. The LLMs failed to help with any of that, they produced code that was 1) incorrect (literally doing the opposite of what’s expected) and 2) full of obvious comments and missing implementetions (like “cleanup if needed” comment in the empty deinit function). Later it turned out there is actually an SDK for my runtime, I just failed to find it at first, so the code the LLM could use or tell me about actually existed (just not very easy to find). Those were two top LLMs as of December 2024. It left me unimpressed. I don’t think I would be compelled to guide them, once I understood how the code works it is faster to just write it or read relevant reference. My friend, who volunteered to waste those precious tokens to help with my project, does use chatbots a lot while coding, but he’s more of an intermediate than senior developer. > Just asking for variable name suggestions is pretty useful. I can’t see myself asking anyone, much less an LLM, for the name of a variable. I am known to ask about and/or look up, say, subject domain terminology that I then use when naming things, but to name things well you first need to have a full picture of what you are making. Our job is to have one… |