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As an Experienced LLM User, I Actually Don't Use Generative LLMs Often

Jonathan Stephens February 19, 2026
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> As a software engineer — and especially as a data scientist — one thing I’ve learnt over the years is that it’s always best to use the right tool when appropriate, and LLMs are just another tool in that toolbox. LLMs can be both productive and counterproductive depending on where and when you use them, but they are most definitely not useless. LLMs are more akin to forcing a square peg into a round hole (at the risk of damaging either the peg or hole in the process) while doing things without LLM assistance is the equivalent of carefully defining a round peg to pass through the round hole without incident. But for some round holes, sometimes shoving the square peg through and asking questions later makes sense when you need to iterate quickly, while sometimes you have to be more precise with both the peg and the hole to ensure neither becomes damaged, because then you have to spend extra time and money fixing the peg and/or hole.

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