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How I program with LLMs
2025-01-06 This document is a summary of my personal experiences using generative models while programming over the past year. It has not been a passive process.
My underlying fascination with the new technology is the only way I have managed to figure it out, so I am sympathetic when other engineers claim LLMs are “useless.” But as I have been asked more than once how I can possibly use them effectively, this post is my attempt to describe what I have found so far. If I have a question about a complex environment, say “how do I make a button transparent in CSS” I will get a far better answer asking any consumer-based LLM, o1, sonnet 3.5, etc, than I do using an old fashioned web search engine and trying to parse the details out of whatever page I land on. You can spend a lot more time writing tests to be readable, because the LLM is not sitting there constantly thinking “it would be better for the company if I went and picked another bug off the issue tracker than doing this.” So the tradeoff shifts in favor of having more specialized implementations.
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