Stop using it for things that are in you area of expertise but are too difficult for you. Use if for things where you think "this is probably easy but I have no idea how to do it". For example, I needed to do some pretty trivial task in powershell but I have never used it so I got chatGPT to do it for me and it worked first time. Obviously I checked the commands looked plausible before I ran them, but it still probably took 2 mins to do something that would have otherwise taken 30.
> Use if for things where you think "this is probably easy but I have no idea how to do it"
I had exactly the same reaction as OP (LLM's suck what's with the all the hype). These people are using it differently. For me it's often something like, asking it to put together a specific sequence of matrix transformations in ThreeJS or some other library.
This is not a difficult task but it's often one I waste a lot of time getting right. It's sort of about finding the right level of abstraction you need to ask it.
That just means you are ignorant of how wrong it guides you. You need to first build trust before taking it new places. You do that with topics and concepts you are familiar with.
This has always been true of anything anyone has ever googled or looked up on stackoverflow
I copy paste code from stackoverflow all the time. I used to agonize over making sure I fully understand every line it's copying. Now I have the discretion of making that decision: sometimes it does really matter, sometimes all you need to know is that it produces the right result for your limited use & test case of it. (it's no different than relying on a 3rd party library in that way)
I think we need to apply the same discretion to LLM output. The answer "it depends". Sometimes using its output blindly leads to disaster. Sometimes using it without fully understanding all the details is a great way to make progress.
This is no different from my coworker who regularly copy/pastes from stackoverflow to do things he doesn't have any idea how to do himself, and just as awful, unproductive, and problem inducing.
