zlacker

THANK YOU.

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+(OP)
That’s nothing, I was a 4X programmer and now I’m a 500x programmer!

I don’t just run one agent, I run all of them!

My time to close tickets is measured in minutes!

I don’t even review code, I have a different agent review it for me!

>>Fridge+v
And to make sure that agent doesn’t make mistakes I have a different agent review that agents work!

>>ofjcih+M
Why would you do this and not just read the code yourself?

>>sneak+(OP)
> I was a 3-4x programmer before. Now I’m a 9-15x programmer

What the fuck does this mean?

>>tptace+Q
Because at thats what you need to do to get a 943x coder black belt

>>tptace+Q
Well given reading code is more tedious than writing it and the author of this article claims gai is most useful for tedious or repetitive code, why would you want to read it? Since this AI agent understands and reasons about the text it writes and reads it should be pretty infallible at checking the code too, right?

Just get another agent to review it and merge it, job done.

>>MegaBu+S
Nerds got taken aside and talked to about how it's not nice or cool to brag about IQ score so they invented a new artificial metric to brag about.

>>MegaBu+S
It means cranking out hello world even faster i guess. I wonder how complex all these projects are people are proud to have completed with the help of AI.

>>Fridge+v
I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic or not, but if you are, the real world is not far behind. I can imagine a world where a mixture of AI agents (some doing hypercritical code review) can return you tested and idiomatic PRs faster than you can describe the new architecture in issues.

I think a lot of people are unfamiliar with the (expensive) SOTA.

>>tptace+Q
The parent neglected to add /s

>>sneak+(OP)
I'm not sure about giving specific metrics or kpis of efficiency or performance

It definitely feels different to develop using LLMs, especially things from scratch. At this point, you can't just have the LLM do everything. Sooner or later you need to start intervening more often, and as the complexity of the project grows, so does the attention you need to give to guiding the LLM. At that point the main gains are mostly in typing and quickly looking some things up, which are still really nice gains

>>MegaBu+S
It’s a riff on the “10x programmer” concept. People who haven’t worked with 10x programmers tend to not believe they exist.

I’m nowhere near that, but even unaided I’m quite a bit faster than most people I’ve hired or worked with. With LLMs my high quality output has easily tripled.

Writing code may be easier than reading it - but reading it is FASTER than writing it. And that’s what matters.

>>sneak+22
Lol omg I guess your original comment was NOT sarcastic!?

>>grey-a+v1
Plus, the sales agents are running to promote the finished product to other companies and close deals, and the accounting agents are checking that all expenses are being accounted for and we have a positive cash flow. Obviously, the audit agents are checking that no errors sneak into this process, according to a plan devised by the legal agents.

>>tptace+Q
why not use AI to summarize the code for you?

>>MegaBu+S
It depends on the value of x. I think it's safe to assume x <= 0.75, else they'd contribute negatively to their teams (happens from time to time, but let's be generous). Previously they'd be anywhere from a 0/10 to 3/10 programmer, and now they get up to 9/10 on a good day but sometimes are a net negative, as low as -2.25/10 on a bad day. I imagine that happens when tired or distracted and unable to adequately police LLM output.

>>MegaBu+S
0x3 and 0x15 is the same value.

>>sneak+(OP)
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+os
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.

>>throwa+12
It can honestly do a lot of complex stuff. But sometimes you have to guide it there.

>>sneak+Bx
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+os
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.

>>throwa+12
I don't use AI to crank out complex parts of projects -- I use to crank out the tedious straight forward stuff that takes a lot of time that is necessary but low-value. Then I'm freed up to work on the hard and interesting stuff.

>>ryandr+tG
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.