I've 100% found AI to be super helpful in learning a new programming language or refreshing on one I haven't used in a while. Hey how do I this thing in Gleam? What's Gleams equivalent of y? I turn it first instead of forums/stackoverflow/google now and would say I only need to turn to other sources less than maybe 5% of the time.
I think that is right. The sweat spot is twofold: 1) A replacement for general search on a topic where you have limited familiarity that can give you an answer for a concise question, or a starting point for more investigation or 2) For power-user use cases, where there already exists subject matter expertise, elaboration or extrapolation from a clear starting point to a clear end state, such as translation or contextualized exposition.
The problem comes with thinking you can bridge both of those use cases - vague task descriptions to final output. The work described in the article of getting an LLM itself to break down a task seems to work sometime but struggles in many scenarios. Products that can define their domain narrowly enough, and embed enough domain knowledge into the system, and can ask the feedback at the right points, and going to be successful and more generalized systems will either need to act more like tools rather than complete solutions.
Yup. Entirely replaced the "soft" answers online like stack overflow for me. Now its LLM and if that isnt good enough then right to docs. I actually read documentation more often now because its pretty clear when I'm trying to do something common (LLM handle this well) vs uncommon (LLM often do not handle this well).
I found this to be the case recently when I built something new in a framework I hadn't used before. The AI replaced Google most of the time and I learned the syntax very fast.
