I certainly have bias on their usefulness because all I’ve ever used them for was to get coding ideas when I had a thorny problem. It was good for giving me a direction of thought on a function or process that I hadn’t considered, but there was so much garbage in the actual code I would never use it. It just pointed me in the right direction to go write my own. So it’s not that I ‘needed’ it, but it did on a few occasions save me some time when I was working on a difficult programming issue. Certainly not earth shattering, but it has been useful a few times for me in that regard.

I don’t even like to talk very much about the fact that I found it slightly useful at work once in a while, because I’m an anti-LLM person, at least in the way they are being promoted. I’m very unhappy with the blind trust so many people and companies put in them, and I think it’s causing real harm.