161–170 of 293 posts
I'm not building commercial software and don't have a commercial job at the moment so I'm kind of struggling with credits otherwise I would probably blow 40-100$ dollars a day.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I completely agree with you that the coders who are "smitten" by LLMs are just inexperienced. I personally find that LLMs get subtle improvements in capability over time and it's usually worthwhile to check in on the progress from time to time. Even if it's just for fun.
I can see why you would chime in to say that in your experience you don't get any value out of it, but to chime in to say that the millions of people who do are "inexperienced" is pretty offensive. In the hands of skilled developers these tools are a complete gamechanger.
What does it add that you couldn't have written yourself faster if you're so skilled?
There are two kinds of engineers. Those who can’t stop raving about how much of a superpower LLMs are for coding, how it’s made them 100x more productive, and is unlocking things they could’ve never done before. And those who, like you, find it to be an extremely finicky process that requires extreme amount of coddling to get average results at best. The only thing I don’t understand is why people from the former gro…
That's because the reality is somewhere in the middle. It obviously isn't 100x or even 10x except for very specific toy tasks, but for me it's probably around ~1.5-2x in everyday work. And I work on mostly long-tail scientific stuff, I imagine it's more if you do something like frontend dev with a lot of boilerplate. I'm absolutely convinced that people who say LLMs are not making them more productive either don't un…
There are two kinds of engineers. Those who can’t stop raving about how much of a superpower LLMs are for coding, how it’s made them 100x more productive, and is unlocking things they could’ve never done before. And those who, like you, find it to be an extremely finicky process that requires extreme amount of coddling to get average results at best. The only thing I don’t understand is why people from the former gro…
That's because the reality is somewhere in the middle. It obviously isn't 100x or even 10x except for very specific toy tasks, but for me it's probably around ~1.5-2x in everyday work. And I work on mostly long-tail scientific stuff, I imagine it's more if you do something like frontend dev with a lot of boilerplate. I'm absolutely convinced that people who say LLMs are not making them more productive either don't un…
I understand how to use LLMs, it's just a much worse workflow. Writing code isn't the hard part, reviewing code is much slower and painful process than writing it from scratch, when you actually know what you're doing.
I'm absolutely convinced that people who are saying LLMs are making them more productive either weren't very productive to begin with or they don't know what they're doing enough to realize what a bad job the LLM is doing
There are two kinds of engineers. Those who can’t stop raving about how much of a superpower LLMs are for coding, how it’s made them 100x more productive, and is unlocking things they could’ve never done before. And those who, like you, find it to be an extremely finicky process that requires extreme amount of coddling to get average results at best. The only thing I don’t understand is why people from the former gro…
At a macro level, people from the former group might be doing better than you think. I have gone from Senior II, to Lead Architect, to Principal Engineer in the years LLMs have been available. It's not literally a 100x multiplier, but I have leveraged their ability to both fill in details where I lack specific knowledge, and as a first point of contact when researching a new space. LLMs have enabled me to widen my sp…
There are two kinds of engineers. Those who can’t stop raving about how much of a superpower LLMs are for coding, how it’s made them 100x more productive, and is unlocking things they could’ve never done before. And those who, like you, find it to be an extremely finicky process that requires extreme amount of coddling to get average results at best. The only thing I don’t understand is why people from the former gro…
I find LLMs make me about 10% more productive – which is great, but nowhere near as extreme as some claims. Cursor autocompletes a lot of stuff I would have typed anyway, and LLM search is a strong complement to Google, though not a direct replacement. Generating more than a few lines usually gives me bad code, but often suggests libraries I didn't know about, especially outside my area of expertise. There's just not…
There are two kinds of engineers. Those who can’t stop raving about how much of a superpower LLMs are for coding, how it’s made them 100x more productive, and is unlocking things they could’ve never done before. And those who, like you, find it to be an extremely finicky process that requires extreme amount of coddling to get average results at best. The only thing I don’t understand is why people from the former gro…
They are. People are building sophisticated products in days not months now. If you can't see that, it's your issue.
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Would you be so kind as to link to some of these sophisticated products? Would love to check them out.
Go look at the latest YC batch. 30% of them were built with 90% of the code being written by LLMs.
Learn some real skills or prepare to not have a job.