Unpopular Opinion

I recently decided to bite the bullet and get into AI and specifically LLMs. Fuck corporate assholes and data hungry companies so I got some second hand GPUs and made a $800 rig that can run 32b models at very usable speeds. I started playing with it and decided to use pycharm with continue and a local ollama to have my own copilot.

I must say, this is the future. Not in the sense that soon we will all be prompt engineers (lol) but assuming that LLMs don't reach a point of true intelligence and continue to be fancier and fancier regurgitation machines, this is like having an instant StackOverflow in your IDE. I don't even bother with complex and unique ideas with it since it really seems that once you reach that area it becomes useless. Basically my programming flow has always started with writing down my rough idea of what I want to do and how I plan on doing it. Now I just feed that to the LLM and it gives me code that is like 90% accurate and I just do a code review, fix mistakes or weird logic and from there as I expand my code I use the LLM as a replacement for online searching. Need syntax help or basic library context? LLM got you covered. Need a function that does something basic or well known? LLM! It's kind of like having an infinite boilerplate library that can custom fit your needs. I think that the reason it works so well for me is that I really only let it handle the basics, anything that I need to think through I do myself.

I doubt we will ever go back from this.