zlacker

>>tablet+(OP)
I’d love to see the authors of effusive praise of generative AI like this provide the proof of the unlimited powers of their tools in code. If GAI (or agents, or whatever comes next …) is so effective it should be quite simple to prove that by creating an AI only company and in short order producing huge amounts of serviceable code to do useful things. So far I’ve seen no sign of this, and the best use case seems to be generating text or artwork which fools humans into thinking it has coherent meaning as our minds love to fill gaps and spot patterns even where there are none. It’s also pretty good at reproducing things it has seen with variations - that can be useful.

So far in my experience watching small to medium sized companies try to use it for real work, it has been occasionally useful for exploring apis, odd bits of knowledge etc, but overall wasted more time than it has saved. I see very few signs of progress.

The time has come for llm users to put up or shut up - if it’s so great, stop telling us and show and use the code it generated on its own.

>>grey-a+ba
I think this is a misunderstanding coder productivity. A 10x engineer isn't 10x faster at popping out Unit tests, that stuff is mind-numbingly boring that turns out a next token predictor can do it with ease. In fact I would guess that really "productive" software engineers, slow down considerably when forced to do this important but slow work*.

The 10x engineer is really good at deducing the next most important thing to do is and doing it quickly. This involves quickly moving past 100's of design decisions in a week to deliver something quickly. It requires you to think partly like a product manager and partly like a senior engineer but that's the game and LLM's are zero help there.

Most engineering productivity is probably locked up in this. So yes, LLM's probably help a lot, just not in the way that would show on some Jira board?

*One could claim that doing this slow work gives the brain a break to then be good at strategizing the higher order more important work. Not sure.