[empath75]

They save me a tremendous amount of time, you just need to be smart about what you try to get them to do. _Busy work_ is what you want to focus on, not anything that takes a ton of domain knowledge and intelligence.

Just as an example from today, i had a huge pile of yaml documents that needed to have some transformations done to them -- they were pretty simple and obvious, but I just went into cursor, give it a before and after and a few notes, and it wrote a python script in less than 10 seconds that converted everything exactly the way I needed. Did it save me a day of work? Probably not, but probably an hour or so of looking up python docs and iterating until i worked out all the syntax errors myself? An hour here and an hour there adds up to a _lot_ of saved time.

I spent more time just writing this comment then I did asking cursor to write and run that script for me.

Other things I had an LLM do for me just _today_ is fix a github action that was failing, and knock out a developer readme for a helm chart documenting what all the values do -- that's one of the kinds of things where it gets a lot of stuff wrong, but typing speed _is_ the bottleneck. It took me a minute or so to fix the stuff it misunderstood, but the formatting and the bulk of it was fine.

[bgnn]

Isn't the article saying it's mainly useful for SW?

I'm an electrical engineer and the only cases LLMs useful were developing phyton scripts or translating a text into a foreign language that I'm fluently speaking.

They are absolutely garbage for anything electrical engineering related, even coding RTL.

[bluefirebrand]

> _Busy work_ is what you want to focus on, not anything that takes a ton of domain knowledge and intelligence

Eh..

Maybe that's more of a sign that we shouldn't be doing busywork in the first place

[empath75]

You are in a magical place if you never have to do busy work.