I have a challenging, repetitive developer task that I need to do ~200 times. It’s for scraping a site and getting similar pieces of data.
I wrote a worksheet for Cursor and give it specific notes for how to accomplish the task in a particular case. Then let it run and it’s fairly successful.
Keep in mind…it’s never truly “hands off” for me. I still need to clean things up after it’s done. But it’s very good at figuring out how to filter the HTML down and parse out the data I need. Plus it writes good tests.
So my success story is that it takes 75% of the energy out of a task I find particularly tedious.
I haven’t found llm code gen to be very good except in cases like you mention here. When you need to do large boilerplatey code with a lot of hardcoded values or parameters. The kind of thing you could probably write a code generator yourself for if you cared enough to do it. Thankfully Llms can save us from some of that.
I wrote a worksheet for Cursor and give it specific notes for how to accomplish the task in a particular case. Then let it run and it’s fairly successful.
Keep in mind…it’s never truly “hands off” for me. I still need to clean things up after it’s done. But it’s very good at figuring out how to filter the HTML down and parse out the data I need. Plus it writes good tests.
So my success story is that it takes 75% of the energy out of a task I find particularly tedious.