Meh, I don't know. I think you can use AI to lorem ipsum a lot of things where it doesn't really matter:
- Making a brochure. You need a photo of a happy family. It doesn't matter if the kids have 7 fingers on each hand.
- You have some dashboard for a service, you don't quite know what the panels need to look like. You ask AI, now you have some inspiration.
- You're building a game, you need a bunch of character names. Boom. 300 names.
- Various utility scripts around whatever code you're writing, like the dashboard, might find use, might not.
None of those things is pretending you're an expert when you're not.
Give AI to a coding novice, it's no different from giving autopilot to a flying novice. Most people know they can't fly a plane, yet most people know that if they did, autopilot would be useful somehow.
> You're building a game, you need a bunch of character names. Boom. 300 names.
This is actually one of the things AI is notoriously bad at. If asking for a plain list, it very quickly falls into blatant patterns (one name per letter of the alphabet, all names starting with A, all names with exactly 2 syllables, etc.). And, whether part of a list or not, one of the most obvious signs of AI writing is that it always resorts to the same handful of names for a given archetype.
Traditional random name generators are much better.
I rather spend one hour to write a script than writing one with AI. If I’m spending that much time, that is a clear signal that it’s important to get right or I’m enjoying the learning process.
As for when there’s a rush, I just avoid putting myself in those situations. If there’s not enough time, I advocate for a simpler solution, even hackish.
That's supporting my view. You might want it, you might not. It's marginal, and now it's cheap.
> look at your competition
LLM does this for you
> this isn't how llm products are marketed
It certainly is. Something like ChatGPT is marketed as a low-risk chat partner, most certainly not pretending to give you medical or legal advice. Talk to it like your buddy, you get buddy responses. Your buddy who has read a few law books but doesn't pretend to be a lawyer.
> Various utility scripts around whatever code you're writing, like the dashboard, might find use, might not.
Let's hope you protect that dashboard well with infra around it, because it will be the front door for people to invade your site.
The same apply in slightly different ways to your deployment script, packaged software (or immutable infra) configuration, and whatever tools you keep around.
> Let's hope you protect that dashboard well with infra around it, because it will be the front door for people to invade your site.
I was thinking of internal dashboards, but like I said above, if it doesn't really matter, use LLM. If you are building a cockpit for an airplane, yeah, don't just use a fill tool. If you need security, yeah, don't leave the door open.
- Making a brochure. You need a photo of a happy family. It doesn't matter if the kids have 7 fingers on each hand.
- You have some dashboard for a service, you don't quite know what the panels need to look like. You ask AI, now you have some inspiration.
- You're building a game, you need a bunch of character names. Boom. 300 names.
- Various utility scripts around whatever code you're writing, like the dashboard, might find use, might not.
None of those things is pretending you're an expert when you're not.
Give AI to a coding novice, it's no different from giving autopilot to a flying novice. Most people know they can't fly a plane, yet most people know that if they did, autopilot would be useful somehow.