Niki Heikkilia has a breakdown of arguments in response to "My AI Skeptic Friends are All Nuts" - a post by Thomas Ptacek that made the rounds last week about why adoption of LLMs for coding assistance must be adopted.
Given the perverse incentives of traffic and attention, I know it will take time, but serious people should read LLMs as a normal technology. Figure out where it's beneficial to you and use it as a tool.
Related to the blockquote here though I find the ability to think about LLM usage from a phase space perspective useful. If your question (and context window) is something that has established patterns - a lot of usage and writing in the web in the last 2-10 years, then it's highly likely that the LLM is going to be useful to you.
In that spirit, I found these list of arguments about why an AI agent might not work to be a great list to keep in mind when leveraging LLMs:
> Here's a summarised list of everything that still requires improvement regarding agentic programming. > > * Never take a rule for granted. Agents are more than willing to bend and break them. > * The more rules you impose on agents, the less they obey you. Talk about a robot uprising! > * Agents get stuck easily, retrying the wrong fix again and again. > * By default, agents touch every file and run every shell command unless you tell them not to. This is a hazardous risk. > * The code agents write for production and tests is incredibly bloated and complicated. To continue from that point would take a significant amount of time, converging towards net zero in productivity gains. > * Agents optimise for the number of lines delivered, which makes reviewing and maintaining their code risky and expensive. > * Agents fill their context window and burn through tokens faster than you realise. This leads to context-switching as you switch to a new thread, requiring an agent to relearn everything. > * Agents rapidly dispatch parallel API requests, often causing your computer to become rate-limited. This abruptly stops the flow since you must wait until the rate limits wear off. > * Most people won't throw away their AI-generated prototypes but continue to use them in production instead. We have witnessed this long before AI and will continue to witness it for the foreseeable future. > * Lastly, working with agents is far from fun. I acknowledge it might affect my overall opinion, but I stand behind it. > > [https://nikoheikkila.fi/blog/my-ai-agents-are-all-nuts/#:~:text=Here%27s%20a%20summarised,stand%20behind%20it.](https://nikoheikkila.fi/blog/my-ai-agents-are-all-nuts/#:~:text=Here%27s%20a%20summarised,stand%20behind%20it.)So leverage that and keep that in mind to ensure that a stochastic system doesn't harm you in your experiments. Good luck.