I'm a skeptical adopter of new tech. But I cut my teeth on LLMs a couple years ago when I was dropped into a project using an older framework I wasn't familiar with. Even back then, LLMs helped me a ton to get familiar with the project and use best practices when I wasn't sure what those were.

And that was just copy & past into ChatGPT.

I don't know about assistants or project integration. But, in my experience, LLMS are a great tool to have and worth learning how to use well, for you. And I think that's the key part. Some people like heavily integrated IDEs, some people prefer a more minimal approach with VS Code or Vim.

I think LLMs are going to be similar. Some people are going to want full integration and some are just going to want minimal interface, context, and edits. It's going to be up to the dev to figure out what works best for him or her.

While I agree, I find the early phases to be the least productive use of my time as it’s often a lot of boilerplate and decisions that require thought but turn to matter very little. Paying $100 to bootstrap to midlife on a new idea seems absurdly cheap given my hourly.