Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
What? LLMs invent things (hallucinate) all the time. I used 250m opus 4.5 input tokens this month.
Not even remotely close to 2023 hallucinations.
Ask HN: By what percentage has AI changed your output as a software engineer?
41–50 of 96 posts
Re: Ask HN: By what percentage has AI changed your output as a software engineer?
#42Extremely context-dependent for me.
For boilerplate stuff like generating tests against a well-defined API, in a compiled language, maybe 2-3x. Far less in languages and frameworks like Ruby/Rails where the distance between generating the code and figuring out if it’s even valid or not is large.
Mechanical refactors that are hard to express via e.g. regex but easy in natural language: maybe 5x.
HTML and CSS, where I know exactly what I want and can clearly articulate it: 2-5x.
For anything architecture-y, off the beaten path, or where generating a substantial amount of code is required: near 0%. Often in the negatives.
Re: Ask HN: By what percentage has AI changed your output as a software engineer?
#43I haven’t gained much productivity by using any of the LLMs, particularly not the recent ones as their thinking ability is nothing else than overthinking and overcomplicating everything.
What I really use LLMs for is to uncover what I should not do, and this is quite a strong win.
Overall, they are generally very bad at giving me anything useful for the things I build.
Re: Ask HN: By what percentage has AI changed your output as a software engineer?
#44Re: Ask HN: By what percentage has AI changed your output as a software engineer?
#45Alternates between +5% and -99.9%. +5 when I can shortcut entire morning worth of work under hour (happens about once in a week) and -99.9% when my job is threatened by managers with AI "vibing" claims (happens about once in a week too)
Re: Ask HN: By what percentage has AI changed your output as a software engineer?
#46Re: Ask HN: By what percentage has AI changed your output as a software engineer?
#475-10% higher in the short term. Who knows in the long term?
I've implemented a few trivial things that I wouldn't have done before if I'd had to type them up by myself.
But the big things that actually take time? Collecting requirements, troubleshooting, planning, design, architecture, research, reading docs? If having basic literacy is 100, then I'd say having LLMs adds about 0.1, if that.
Re: Ask HN: By what percentage has AI changed your output as a software engineer?
#48At home pissing about- 5x faster. At work, I think actively slows me down. At first I thought the difference was that at work I needed something very precise, and I wasn’t good enough at prompting to deliver that precision. Now I think it’s that if I try to do a hobby project and the AI steamrolls over any prompting to do a slightly different worse hobby project, I’m way less likely to notice or resist because there’s no iron requirement of profit maintaining discipline.
Re: Ask HN: By what percentage has AI changed your output as a software engineer?
#49Hard to tell... It's not double or more net gain, that I can tell.
I'm not even entirely sure it's a net positive at this point but it feels like it.
I would say probably between 20% to 50% more productive.