My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

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.

>>sneak+t
I hate how the discourse around LLM-assisted programing is so polarized. It's either detractors saying it's "a fad that's useless and going nowhere, wasting billions of megawatts every year" or it's true believers calling it "the most miraculous sea change technological advancement in my lifetime" or "more important than fire and electricity[1]." There just doesn't seem to be any room in the middle.

I tried out Copilot a few months back to see what all the fuss was about and so that I could credibly engage with discussions having actually used the technology. I'd rate it as "kind of neat-o" but not earth shattering. It was like the first time I used an IDE with auto-complete. Oh, cool, nice feature. Would I pay monthly for it? No way. Would I integrate it into my development workflow if it were free? Maybe, I guess? Probably wouldn't bother unless it came literally set up for me out of the box like autocomplete does nowadays.

Don't get me wrong--it's cool technology. Well done, AI people. Is it "the 2nd most important thing to happen over the course of my career" as OP wrote? Come on, let's come down to earth a little.

1: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/01/google-ceo-sundar-pichai-ai-...

>>ryandr+Rs
I don't know. I think 9-12 months ago I'd agree with you. But I feel like the last 6 months my productivity has vastly improved. Not only that, it's also brought back a little bit of passion for the field.

It's easy to come up with some good ideas for new project, but then not want to do a lot of the garbage work related to the project. I offload all that shit to the LLM now.

Seriously, the LLMs have increased my productivity 2-4x.

zlacker