I was a 3-4x programmer before. Now I’m a 9-15x programmer when wrangling LLMs.
This is a sea change and it’s already into “incredible” territory and shows no signs of slowing down.
> Think of anything you wanted to build but didn’t. You tried to home in on some first steps. If you’d been in the limerent phase of a new programming language, you’d have started writing. But you weren’t, so you put it off, for a day, a year, or your whole career.
I have been banging out little projects that I have wanted to exist for years but always had on the back burner. Write a detailed readme and ask the agent to interrogate you about the missing parts of the spec then update the README. Then have it make a TODO and start implementing. Give it another code base for style guide.
I’ve made more good and useful and working code in the last month than I have in the last two years.
It definitely feels different to develop using LLMs, especially things from scratch. At this point, you can't just have the LLM do everything. Sooner or later you need to start intervening more often, and as the complexity of the project grows, so does the attention you need to give to guiding the LLM. At that point the main gains are mostly in typing and quickly looking some things up, which are still really nice gains