LLMs for coding - surprisingly helpful
There's been a lot of talk about AI, and specifically LLMs (large language models, like ChatGPT). Much of this talk is polarised into "it's going to change the world (and perhaps make me redundant)" to "it's massively over-hyped and is essentially useless". I probably sat towards the over-hyped end of this spectrum, until I started properly trying to use an LLM to help with coding. I got into this through this excellent article from The Guardian, which led me to this article by Simon Willison, which includes a lot of sage advice on how to get the most out of LLMs for programming. Like most tools, to get the most out of it you have to know how to use it, and understand its limitations. One useful way of thinking about this is that the LLM is good at coding - leaving you to think about the programming. Simon Willison likens the LLM to an intern - you might have to specify in detail what you want them to do, but they (mostly) will be able to do it. If you...