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.
You might as well do that since any productivity gains will go to your employer, not you.
That's an argument for LLMs.
>you’re just using an LLM to acquire more free time on the company dime.
This is a bad thing?
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.
You can't own your own SV home but you can become a slumlord somewhere else remotely.