There's a large continuum between great and crap, and it sounds like you've placed a rather high bar to even consider using it.
I don't like BASH scripting. I wanted to automate a certain task and dump it in a justfile for convenient reference.
Learning BASH scripting would be a poor use of my time - I didn't value the knowledge I would gain.
Using Google to piece together everything I needed would have been very painful. Painful enough that I simply didn't bother in the past.
Asking an LLM solved the problem for me. It took about 6 iterations, because I had somewhat underspecified and the scripts it returned, while correct, had side effects I didn't like.
But even though it took several iterations it was infinitely more satisfying than the other options. Every time it failed I would explain to it what went wrong and it would amend the script.
It's like having an employee do the work for me, but much much cheaper.
That's the power of LLMs. They enable me to do things that just weren't worth the time in the past.
Would I use it for my main programming work? No. But does it increase my productivity? Definitely.
That sounds awful to me. I spent maybe 1 or 2 days reading the woolidge bash guide, and the Dylan araps bash Bible and now I have that skill forever. Sure I spent more time practicing but I can craft exactly what I want without even thinking about it. I value that knowledge. Use shellcheck and the bash lsp and that's it.
But they way you talk about makes me feel weird. It honestly sounds a little insane.
If we're going with anecdotes, I have learned Bash scripting and zsh scripting separately at different points in my life. Both times I forgot it very quickly. My guess is that you value that knowledge and that helps you retain it. Practice of course helps.
For me, my primary shell both at work and at home is xonsh, which is Python-based, and 90+% of all shell scripting I do is in Python in that shell. Having that knowledge of Bash is not even worth 2 days for me. If I were an embedded developer or a system administrator where I often have to SSH into accounts I don't control I could value Bash more but that's not the case for me and a fairly significant percentage of software engineers. Why spend a few days learning it when I don't need it? Even in the example above, I did it for my convenience, not because I needed it.
That's not what I find insane though, nor is it what I said. The fact that this person is willing to sink in a ton of time iteratively coercing an LLM to spit out something that they themselves admitted had negative side effects, and didn't work that well, and describing it like hounding a personal employee in the name of "productivity" is like 7 layers of insane to me. All to avoid spending, probably less, time learning. Like I'm baffled at what motivates people who are like this. It's gotta be money right?
I'm a former/old-school professional programmer (now a retired CIO) and I still love automating my life with an assortment of tech (e.g. python, bash, c#, c++, jscript, etc). My knowledge of these tools isn't indepth... so being able to use AI to assist with generating the base code is a godsend.
My experience using chatgpt has been quite positive overall... sometimes it comes up with elegant solutions, sometimes its dog shit - but generally it's a useful starting point.
I don't like BASH scripting. I wanted to automate a certain task and dump it in a justfile for convenient reference.
Learning BASH scripting would be a poor use of my time - I didn't value the knowledge I would gain.
Using Google to piece together everything I needed would have been very painful. Painful enough that I simply didn't bother in the past.
Asking an LLM solved the problem for me. It took about 6 iterations, because I had somewhat underspecified and the scripts it returned, while correct, had side effects I didn't like.
But even though it took several iterations it was infinitely more satisfying than the other options. Every time it failed I would explain to it what went wrong and it would amend the script.
It's like having an employee do the work for me, but much much cheaper.
That's the power of LLMs. They enable me to do things that just weren't worth the time in the past.
Would I use it for my main programming work? No. But does it increase my productivity? Definitely.