Mixed
LLMs were worse than useless
alloyed on Hacker News
In the thread “Ask HN: By what percentage has AI changed your output as a software engineer?”
Helped: Maintaining CMake files and writing small specific plugins.
Got in the way: Large mechanical refactors in complex C++ apps.
So, in my professional work environment, which is a complex C++ app with long build times and lots of proprietary domain-specific knowledge, LLMs were worse than useless. Not totally surprising, but I originally had hopes for something like Cursor being useful in terms of simplifying the process of large mechanical refactors, which it decidedly wasn't. …