zlacker

>>tablet+(OP)
>If you were trying and failing to use an LLM for code 6 months ago †, you’re not doing what most serious LLM-assisted coders are doing.

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.

>>davidc+K8
tptacek wasn't making this argument six months ago.

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.

>>simonw+Oa
But they say "yes, it didn't work 6 months ago, but it does now", and they say this every month. They're constantly resetting the goal post.

Today it works, it didn't in the past, but it does now. Rinse and repeat.

>>JohnKe+bl
It doesn’t really matter what this or that person said six months ago or what they are saying today. This morning I used cursor to write something in under an hour that previously would have taken me a couple of days. That is what matters to me. I gain nothing from posting about my experience here. I’ve got nothing to sell and nothing to prove.

You write like this is some grand debate you are engaging in and trying to win. But to people on what you see as the other side, there is no debate. The debate is over.

You drag your feet at your own peril.

>>skwirl+3u
The thing about people making claims like “An LLM did something for me in an hour that would take me days” is that people conveniently leave out what their own skill level is.

I’ve definitely seen humans do stuff in an hour that takes others days to do. In fact, I see it all the time. And sometimes, I know people who have skills to do stuff very quickly but they choose not to because they’d rather procrastinate and not get pressured to pick up even more work.

And some people waste even more time writing stuff from scratch when libraries exist for whatever they’re trying to do, which could get them up and running quickly.

So really I don’t think these bold claims of LLMs being so much faster than humans hit as hard as some people think they do.

And here’s the thing: unless you’re using the time you save to fill yourself up with even more work, you’re not really making productivity gains, you’re just using an LLM to acquire more free time on the company dime.

>>deadba+jv
Again, implicit in this comment is the belief that I am out to or need to convince you of something. You would be the only person who would benefit from that. I don’t gain anything from it. All I get out of this is having insulting comments about my “skill level” posted by someone who knows nothing about me.

>>skwirl+EA
You don’t know the harm you’re inflicting. Some manager will read your comment and conclude that anyone who isn’t reducing tasks that previously took hours or days into a brief 1 hour LLM session is underperforming.

In reality, there is a limit to how quickly tasks can be done. Around here, the size of PRs usually have changes that most people could just type out in under 30 minutes if they knew exactly what to type. However, getting to the point where you know exactly what you need to type takes days or even weeks, often collaborating across many teams and thinking deep about potential long term impacts down the road, and balancing company ROI and roadmap objectives, perhaps even running experiments.

You cannot just throw LLMs at those problems and have them wrapped up in an hour. If that’s what you’re doing, you’re not working on big problems, you’re doing basic refactors and small features that don’t require high level skills, where the bottleneck is mostly how fast you can type.