I mostly agree with the points, but I've also managed to throw AI efficiently at the problem.
We're running a self-hosted GitLab -> hosted GitHub migration at my company (which to me feels a downgrade), and without LLMs I would have spent weeks just researching syntax for how to implement the requirements I had.
I asked Claude to simply "translate these GL templates to GH actions, I want 1 flow for this, 1 flow for that, etc" and it mostly worked. Then in the repos I link the template and ask Claude to write the workflow that uses the template with the correct inputs. I think I saved maybe 3 months worth of coding and debugging workflows. Besides maybe picking slightly outdated actions (e.g. action@v4 instead of action@v6), 95% of the work was ok, and I had to tweak a couple things afterwards.
Looks like my job is ensuring stuff builds, tests and ships correctly, not learning the 100th no-design botched homegrown language that will keep changing for the next 10y until it's a different thing altogether. And because I'm one person out of two in a ~15ppl company, where time and efficiency matter, LLMs really helped out.
We're running a self-hosted GitLab -> hosted GitHub migration at my company (which to me feels a downgrade), and without LLMs I would have spent weeks just researching syntax for how to implement the requirements I had.
I asked Claude to simply "translate these GL templates to GH actions, I want 1 flow for this, 1 flow for that, etc" and it mostly worked. Then in the repos I link the template and ask Claude to write the workflow that uses the template with the correct inputs. I think I saved maybe 3 months worth of coding and debugging workflows. Besides maybe picking slightly outdated actions (e.g. action@v4 instead of action@v6), 95% of the work was ok, and I had to tweak a couple things afterwards.