They save me a tremendous amount of time, you just need to be smart about what you try to get them to do. _Busy work_ is what you want to focus on, not anything that takes a ton of domain knowledge and intelligence.
Just as an example from today, i had a huge pile of yaml documents that needed to have some transformations done to them -- they were pretty simple and obvious, but I just went into cursor, give it a before and after and a few notes, and it wrote a python script in less than 10 seconds that converted everything exactly the way I needed. Did it save me a day of work? Probably not, but probably an hour or so of looking up python docs and iterating until i worked out all the syntax errors myself? An hour here and an hour there adds up to a _lot_ of saved time.
I spent more time just writing this comment then I did asking cursor to write and run that script for me.
Other things I had an LLM do for me just _today_ is fix a github action that was failing, and knock out a developer readme for a helm chart documenting what all the values do -- that's one of the kinds of things where it gets a lot of stuff wrong, but typing speed _is_ the bottleneck. It took me a minute or so to fix the stuff it misunderstood, but the formatting and the bulk of it was fine.
Isn't the article saying it's mainly useful for SW?
I'm an electrical engineer and the only cases LLMs useful were developing phyton scripts or translating a text into a foreign language that I'm fluently speaking.
They are absolutely garbage for anything electrical engineering related, even coding RTL.
Just as an example from today, i had a huge pile of yaml documents that needed to have some transformations done to them -- they were pretty simple and obvious, but I just went into cursor, give it a before and after and a few notes, and it wrote a python script in less than 10 seconds that converted everything exactly the way I needed. Did it save me a day of work? Probably not, but probably an hour or so of looking up python docs and iterating until i worked out all the syntax errors myself? An hour here and an hour there adds up to a _lot_ of saved time.
I spent more time just writing this comment then I did asking cursor to write and run that script for me.
Other things I had an LLM do for me just _today_ is fix a github action that was failing, and knock out a developer readme for a helm chart documenting what all the values do -- that's one of the kinds of things where it gets a lot of stuff wrong, but typing speed _is_ the bottleneck. It took me a minute or so to fix the stuff it misunderstood, but the formatting and the bulk of it was fine.