It will generate bad tests, so you will have lots of tests blocking your work, but won’t actually test the important properties.
Mass refactoring.
That’s an amount of trust in the LLM capacity to not create hidden corner cases and your capacity to review large-scale changes that… I find your complete faith disturbing.
Which the answer is: never. If they did, by definition they would not be competent (unless they are being specifically trained in how to avoid code slop).
As always, the specific situation matters. Some refactors are mostly formulaic, and AI does great at that. For example, “add/change this database field, update the form, then update the api, update the admin page, update the ui, etc.” is perfectly reasonable to send an AI off to do, and can save plenty of programmer time.
It will generate bad tests, so you will have lots of tests blocking your work, but won’t actually test the important properties.
That’s an amount of trust in the LLM capacity to not create hidden corner cases and your capacity to review large-scale changes that… I find your complete faith disturbing.
I mean, it’s not like it ships it to production. You can read code it writes and modify it if you don’t like it, or choose not to use it.
If you can read the code it writes and modify it, a project manager can remove that time from you and take the AI slop direct to production.
Another good reason to never let the company’s project become your project.
That’s a different problem. The original question was when would a competent dev use an LLM.
Which the answer is: never. If they did, by definition they would not be competent (unless they are being specifically trained in how to avoid code slop).
As always, the specific situation matters. Some refactors are mostly formulaic, and AI does great at that. For example, “add/change this database field, update the form, then update the api, update the admin page, update the ui, etc.” is perfectly reasonable to send an AI off to do, and can save plenty of programmer time.
Until you don’t properly check the diff, a +/- or </=/>/<=/>= was reversed, and you now have an RCE in test, soon to be in prod.