They're idiot savants. Use them for their strengths. Know their weaknesses.

So, what are their strengths then? I've fed it with a detailed, very well documented and typed API description. Asking to construct me some not too hard code snippets based on that. GPT-5 then pretend to do the right thing, but actually is creating meaningless nonsense out of it. Even after I tried to reiterate and refine my tasks. Every junior dev is waaay better.

I recently had something no longer compile. I got bored sniffing around after maybe an hour, set Claude in Zed on to it, got a snack, and by the time I was back it had found the problem.

When I am unsure how to implement something, I give an LMM a rough description and then tell it to ask me five questions it needs to get a good solution. More often than not, that uncovers a blind spot.

LLMs remain unhelpful at writing code beyond trivial tasks though.

Parsing a thousand line stack trace and telling me what the problem was. Writing regexes. Spitting out ffmpeg commands.