> The only really good use case for LLMs is spam, because it's the only use case for generating a lot of human-like speech without meaning.
As someone who's been writing code for nearly 20 years now, and who spent a few weeks rewriting a Flutter app in Jetpack Compose with some help from Claude (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=me.johnmaguire...), I have to say I don't agree with this at all.
Claude isn't Copilot, and I wasn't using it as autocomplete. I was using it to do things such as:
- Creating a migration from the old DB to the new DB, no modifications of the generated code necessary
- Refactoring state in a component out into a ViewModel, again no modifications necessary
- Creating all the classes necessary for interacting with a Room database (i.e. the data class, dao, and DI module) given a schema
- Creating the first iteration of a download worker, which I modified
Check out plugins like ClaudeMind for JetBrains! They can even intelligently (automatically) feed information from your current tab or other unopened but relevant-sounding files to the AI. It was an eye-opening experience.
I would consider all of that fancy autocomplete. If it's just helping you type boring boilerplate things you would have typed anyway, that's autocomplete.
It's neat, but it's not the paradigm shift people seem to think it is. Copilot mostly just replaces StackOverflow searches for me.
I was a little too young to really remember the early internet era and the skeptics, but looking back at that era in hindsight, it's interesting to see the commentary from those who thought it was a fad, or not impressive, or did everything to downplay what was so obviously one of the biggest technological advances in human history. I can't help but feel I am witnessing these same type of comments and viewpoints in real time from people like you on the subject of AI. It's a funny feeling, like watching a slow moving train wreck about to happen. There are going to be people left behind in the world because of their failure to adapt to the new tech, just like there was during the advent of the internet age, and it just seems so obvious already as to who those people are going to be.
"I just don't get what is so great about websites, they are just fancy books! It mostly just replaces going to the book store for me." - you of yesteryear
I do remember those days, and the idea that people thought the internet was a fad is wildly overblown.
The reason was: (1) it wasn't new, wide access to it was new and (2) there was clear value to it that could be explained to others and used immediately
Neither of those are true for LLMs. It just has a lot of weird hype men who get huffy and DARVO if you say what you honestly think lol
As someone who's been writing code for nearly 20 years now, and who spent a few weeks rewriting a Flutter app in Jetpack Compose with some help from Claude (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=me.johnmaguire...), I have to say I don't agree with this at all.