I use them for a bit of coding leverage, and they require a fair bit of… not hand holding, but explicitness, maybe. Otherwise they wander down the path of statistical averageness, and the average code they saw during training was shit.
So they’ll happily serve up a pile of inefficient dogshit, complete with working tests and docs and all of that. And then they’ll happily refactor it at your suggestion to slowly turn it into something that’s resource friendly and generally secure and generally expandable.
But there’s no way for them to do that by themselves if you don’t have the basic domain knowledge to guide them in the right direction. You’ll just get average code, and once you’ve been in the game for a few decades, you realise that nice, efficient, quality code is the rarity, not the norm.


Where we’re going, we don’t need
roadsa rear window.