I noticed that LLMs need a very heavy hand in guiding the architecture, otherwise they'll add architectural tech debt. One easy example is that I noticed them breaking abstractions (putting things where they don't belong). Unfortunately, there's not that much self-retrospection on these aspects if you ask about the quality of the code or if there are any better ways of doing it. Of course, if you pick up that something is in the wrong spot and prompt better, they'll pick up on it immediately.
I also ended up blowing through $15 of LLM tokens in a single evening. (Previously, as a heavy LLM user including coding tasks, I was averaging maybe $20 a month.)
This is a feature, not a bug. LLMs are going to be the next "OMG my AWS bill" phenomenon.
Some well-paid developers will excuse this with, "Well if it saved me 5 minutes, it's worth an order of magnitude than 10 cents".
Which is true, however there's a big caveat: Time saved isn't time gained.
You can "Save" 1,000 hours every night, but you don't actuall get those 1,000 hours back.
What do you mean?
If I have some task that requires 1000 hours, and I'm able to shave it down to one hour, then I did just "save" 999 hours -- just in the same way that if something costs $5 and I pay $4, I saved $