The LLMs turn out fully formed clones of stuff for which there exists copious amounts of code openly searchable on the web doing the exact same thing.
LLMs require developer-like specification, task/subtask breakdown and detail where such example code already exists.
As a professional prior to LLMs, how many problems that you work on have many existing free solutions but you neglected to use that code and decided to spend days doing it yourself?
I’ve often reimplemented things at work that exist elsewhere. If I could just copy & paste whole solutions from GitHub and change the branding/naming slightly, I could make curl in an afternoon.
I can only think of hobby projects, like writing yet another emulator, expression parser or media processor in a new language I'm trying to master.
In a professional setting, you would always diligently explore libraries and only implement your own if there is no suitable alternative.
Only when the existing free solutions are licensed with something like GPL. Now I can just say, write me a C webserver library similar to mongoose and I get the functionality without the license burden.
And you now own full responsibility for maintenance.
Also I was joking, I'd never do that; feels gross. But I suppose it is a legitimate "productive" use of AI.
I read how that’ll read to VCs coming from Altman and Musk and, ow, the entire stock market just made sense for a second.