One place where my colleagues (and to a lesser extent, myself) have found LLMs to be useful is in multilingual situations.

When English is not your first language, but your coding standard requires things to be programmed in English, sometimes you can struggle to use the correct name for a variable, especially when those words are false friends, or are concepts that aren’t one word in English. The LLM can make sensible suggestions for variable and function names and the like. I’ve had to do fewer refactorings of colleague’s work due to inappropriate name use since they started with Copilot.

Similarly, pasting a description in Spanish into one of these things and asking for an outline onto which to hang your code on in English has helped, with proper code review.

This stuff is not panacea, but it can help when applied with a healthy dose of scepticism. @kitten_tech’s OP conclusion is valid, as the benefits are still marginal.

3/3

@moof

I am tempted to try one of these “code your own mobile app” demo things, as it’s a platform I’m unfamiliar with, and I have some itches to scratch.

I wrote my first Android app a couple of months ago. I did it in Android Studio, which didn’t have Copilot set up. It took half a day (having it touched Java for 6-8 years, and then mostly only to write test cases when hacking on the internals of a JVM). I went from nothing to a working app in under a day.

The things that took time were:

- Google’s CADT problem meant that a lot of things in the build system had changed from the time tutorials were written and figuring out the differences always annoying.
- The MQTT library I was using needed some extra things for compatibility with older SDKs and they were enabled by default, the instructions for turning them off were documented but figuring out that this was the problem took time.
- I spent ages debugging a connection problem that I assumed was a permissions issue. It turned out that the MQTT server was down (but its status page was not).

I don’t think an LLM would have helped with any of these problems.

Android development is so much worse then OpenStep development in 1992 (iOS is a cleaned up version of OpenStep tuned for touchscreens and systems with more than 8 MiB of RAM, so I presume it’s better). Adding LLMs won’t fix that, thinking about APIs before you ship a thing that you likely have to support for a decade or so would. In spite of it being a truly terrible platform for developers, it was pretty easy to build something that worked.

Twenty years ago, we were building minimal-code platforms where you could build CRUD web and desktop apps with a few dozen lines of code for your business logic. A lot of frameworks seem to have massively regressed since then. If anything, relying on LLMs to fill in the code that shouldn’t be necessary in the first place will make this worse.