[nicklaf]

Personally, I don't trust LLMs to write code for me, generally speaking. That said, as of late I've been very pleased with the whole "shoehorn your problem to fit code examples found online" thing these LLMs do, in the very special case of massaging unix scripts, and where the "code examples found online" part seems to mostly amount to making fairly canonical reference to features documented in man pages that are plastered all over the web and haven't changed much in decades.

For questions that I know should have a straightforward answer, I think it beats searching Stackoverflow. Sure, I'll typically end up having to rewrite most of the script from scratch; however, if I give it a crude starting point of a half-functional script I've already got going, pairing that with very clear instructions on how I'd like it extended is usually enough to get it to write a proof of concept demonstration that contains enough insightful suggestions for me to spend some time reading about features in man pages I hadn't yet thought to use.

The biggest problem maybe is a propensity for these models to stick in every last fancy feature under the sun. It's fun to read about a GNU extension to awk that makes my script a couple lines shorter, but at best I'll take this as an educational aside than something I'd accept at the expense of portability.