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Ask HN: If LLMs are so useful, why haven't we seen any spike in productivity?

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Ask HN: If LLMs are so useful, why haven't we seen any spike in productivity?

#1

Post by pera »

If LLM do actually help engineers become significantly more productive what could explain that, for instance, in the open source community:

- We are not fixing bugs faster

- We are not developing features faster

- We haven't seen an explosion of new projects

- We haven't seen an explosion of vulnerabilities being discovered

Maybe I am missing something but to me everything looks the same (except for an increasing amount of useless customer service chatbots and garbage LLM generated books on Amazon)

Edit: Unfortunately this submission was demoted for some reason but thanks for all the comments.

Re: Ask HN: If LLMs are so useful, why haven't we seen any spike in productivity?

#3

Post by pera »

dewey wrote: post #2

Turns out the bottleneck of engineering isn't related to what goes on in the editor.

I agree with your comment to certain degree, specially in a commercial enterprise environment, but programming is still very time consuming and if a new invention made us faster it would be something noticeable, no?

Re: Ask HN: If LLMs are so useful, why haven't we seen any spike in productivity?

#4

Post by xenospn »

pera wrote: post #3
dewey wrote: post #2

Turns out the bottleneck of engineering isn't related to what goes on in the editor.

I agree with your comment to certain degree, specially in a commercial enterprise environment, but programming is still very time consuming and if a new invention made us faster it would be something noticeable, no?

You don’t think bespoke emojis are a boost to productivity?

Re: Ask HN: If LLMs are so useful, why haven't we seen any spike in productivity?

#5

Post by talldayo »

pera wrote: post #3
dewey wrote: post #2

Turns out the bottleneck of engineering isn't related to what goes on in the editor.

I agree with your comment to certain degree, specially in a commercial enterprise environment, but programming is still very time consuming and if a new invention made us faster it would be something noticeable, no?

Just speaking from my experience, here; when I sit down to code, actually typing out the logic of what I want is not what I spend my time doing. I research optimization options, I prep old code for new features and refactor cruft. I have an AI-enabled editor, but besides generating boilerplate the AI-based features are mostly useless. My job doesn't rely on endlessly generating buggy code, it depends on the existence of endless buggy code that needs correcting.

Re: Ask HN: If LLMs are so useful, why haven't we seen any spike in productivity?

#6

Post by proc0 »

Writing code is the easiest part of the process (relatively speaking). Figuring out the requirements, working with stakeholders to drive consensus, and understanding user needs is the bulk of the work.

LLMs will certainly lower the entry barriers for new programmers, and might also create a new solopreneur economy because of it. Now non-technical people with ideas can start prototyping and raise money, but would soon need engineers to grow the product.

Re: Ask HN: If LLMs are so useful, why haven't we seen any spike in productivity?

#7

Post by dave4420 »

My employer pays GitHub ~£10/month for me to use GitHub’s copilot. This is tiny compared to what they pay me.

It unlocks a small amount of extra productivity, but not that much. Yet still enough to be worth it.

My position is that they are useful but not massively useful, yet.

Re: Ask HN: If LLMs are so useful, why haven't we seen any spike in productivity?

#8

Post by franciscop »

How do you expect to "see those"? I have e.g. started using LLM (in a limited manner) to help me write TS Definitions for my OSS projects. I've also used gen AI to create art for multiple of my projects as well. But those haven't "unlocked" my productivity 10x, they have just allowed me to have a bit more of free time/less headaches.

But I still love programming and will mostly continue to do so when it's for fun, which is most of my OSS. For me it's like saying "why do you do woodworking when you can outsource it to some Chinese shop?" when it defeats the point.

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