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
Copilot is a bad yardstick. The article literally addresses exactly this. It’s not just “cool technology”, that’s the point. It enables things that were previously impossible.

I spent $600 on claude via cursor last month and it was easily worth 2-3x that.

>>sneak+4y
Since the "state of the art" seems to change every week, what's a good way to try out the current "state of the art", without spending $600? I'd love to give it a shot and be proven wrong, but I'm not going to spend 1/2 a mortgage payment on a trial.

EDIT: Looks like the "Cursor" thing has a free trial. Might start there.

>>ryandr+WG
I spent $600 because I did something like 5200 uses.

You can start off for much less. I recommend trying claude-4-opus max/thinking. There might be cheaper options but that’s the one that has given me the best results so far.

zlacker