[animal531]

Good use: Asking it to help with language specifics, all the nit-picky stuff. Include other basics like well known math and/or small methods.

Poor use: Anything related to using intuition and/or the though process behind decision making.

[rmholt]

I would argue the exact opposite.

Language specifics you can look up and confirm easily. But recent gpt-4o tried to convince me that Python added a pipe operator in 3.13. Even had sources. To my disappointment, that's just a lie. (https://chatgpt.com/share/67de9c77-d5f4-8012-9f1c-ac15b70aee...)

On the other hand, intuition and thought process is something I have good experience with ChatGPT, ie deciding on architecture (tRPC vs gRPC vs REST for my use case).

I would say good use: generating small code snippets, architecture decisions

Bad use: Anything documentation related, any specific feature, any nitpicks. (Just ask the security guys how good chatgpt is at paying attention to the little things) Anything you can look up in docs / ref. Anything where there is a clear yes / no answer

Note: A good use of LLMs imho is trying to get a start point for lookup docs, like

"What's that thing in Python like [x for x in...] called and where can I find more info". If you however ask it for exact rules for list comprehension it's gonna tell you lies sometimes

Edit2: Unless you mean like really general language specifics. Like how do I make classes in Ruby. In that case yeah that works

[hackerthemonkey]

> A good use of LLMs imho is trying to get a start point for lookup docs, like

I like this and resonate with it a lot. Sometimes you don’t know what you don’t know or you you just a little about what you might not know. This helps at least give you a name for the thing which you can then verify from source.

[skydhash]

> Sometimes you don’t know what you don’t know or you you just a little about what you might not know.

If you find yourself in this situation, that usually means you've skipped something on the way. Kinda like wanting to contribute to ffmpeg's core with no understanding of audio codecs and containers. Or wanting to code web applications with no knowledge of HTTP and the TCP stack, sysadmin, the DOM API, what cascading in CSS means,...

[rs186]

No, absolutely not. Well, maybe JavaScript, but they are horrible at languages like C++. Just yesterday, I asked multiple LLMs (GPT, Claude, Gemini) why my code does not compile, with the error message, and asked for a solution. None provided a correct answer or a correct fix, after multiple attempts. I ended up figuring out the real error myself using my own knowledge and fixed it myself.

These LLMs are really just clueless when it comes to any problem that is slightly more complex.