Yeah the fact that just composing the first prompt would take me longer than just doing the thing is my biggest blocker to using any of these tools on a regular basis
Which is also assuming it gets it right the first prompt, and not 15 minutes of prompt hacking later, giving up and doing it the old fashioned way anyway.
The risk of wasted time is higher than the proposed benefit, for most of my current use cases. I don't do heaps of glue code, it's mostly business logic, and one off fixes, so I have not found LLMs to be useful day to day at work.
Where it has been useful is when I need to do a task with tech I don't use often. I usually know exactly what I want to do but don't have the myriad arcane details. A great example would be needing to do a complex MongoDB query when I don't normally use Mongo.
Cursor + Sonnet has been great for scaffolding tests.
I'll stub out tests (just a name and `assert true`) and have it fill them in. It usually gets them wrong, but I can fix one and then have it update the rest to match.
Not perfect, but beats writing all the tests myself.
