alt Hacker NewsAn LLM has never saved me time. It has always produced something that doesn't quite work, has the rough shape of what I want, but somehow always gets all the details wrong.
I can type up what I want much faster and be sure it's at least solving the right problem, even if it may have bugs.
There are also tools to generate boilerplate that work much much better than LLMs. And they're deterministic.
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You're going to get a lot of "skill issue" comments but your experience basically matches mine. I've only found LLMs to be useful for quick demos where I explicitly didn't care about the quality of implementation. For my core responsibility it has never met my quality bar and after getting it there has not saved me time. What I'm learning is different people and domains have very different standards for that.
> An LLM has never saved me time. It has always produced something that doesn't quite work, has the rough shape of what I want, but somehow always gets all the details wrong.
This reads like a skill issue on your end, in part at least in the prompting side.
It does take time to reach a point where you can prompt an LLM sufficiently well to get a correct answer in one shot, developing an intuitive understanding of what absolutely needs to be written out and what can be inferred by the model.
If you do not plan out the architecture soundly, no amount of prompting will fix it if it is bad. I know this because my "handmade" project made with backward compatibility and horrible architecture keeps being badly fixed by LLM while the ones that rely on preemptive planning of the features and architecture, end up working right.