Here’s the thing from the skeptic perspective: This statement keeps getting made on a rolling basis. 6 months ago if I wasn’t using the life-changing, newest LLM at the time, I was also doing it wrong and being a luddite.
It creates a never ending treadmill of boy-who-cried-LLM. Why should I believe anything outlined in the article is transformative now when all the same vague claims about productivity increases were being made about the LLMs from 6 months ago which we now all agree are bad?
I don’t really know what would actually unseat this epistemic prior at this point for me.
In six months, I predict the author will again think the LLM products of 6 month ago (now) were actually not very useful and didn’t live up to the hype.
LLMs get better over time. In doing so they occasionally hit points where things that didn't work start working. "Agentic" coding tools that run commands in a loop hit that point within the past six months.
If your mental model is "people say they got better every six months, therefore I'll never take them seriously because they'll say it again in six months time" you're hurting your own ability to evaluate this (and every other) technology.
I've been using Cline and it can do a few of the things suggested as "agentic", but I'd have no idea how to leave it writing and then running tests in a VM and creating a PR for me to review. Or let it roam around in the file tree and create new files as needed. How does that work? Are there better tools for this? Or do I need to configure Cline in some way?