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Ask HN: Become a 10x developer with LLM? Myth? Reality?

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Ask HN: Become a 10x developer with LLM? Myth? Reality?

#1
I keep hearing from VC's on the internet mainly the right now in the `all in podcast` there are people who have leveraged LLM to become a 10x dev.

What stack are they using? I am thinking it's pretty much any LLM (GPT-3/GPT-4), Lang chain with GPT Index.

I am guessing they build boilerplate templates and filling in functions with GPT outputs then using them to write unit tests for base cases?

I am guessing the truth is really closer to the centre.

Re: Ask HN: Become a 10x developer with LLM? Myth? Reality?

#2
I have used ChatGPT to cut down one of my jobs to maybe 3 hours of coding work a week. The job is extracting data from JSON and putting it into differently formatted JSON. It does a great job of designing extractors and putting it into a different format.

Re: Ask HN: Become a 10x developer with LLM? Myth? Reality?

#3
It gives me faster access to documentation/Stackoverflow, and creates bespoke templates. So I am "10x" but for the most tedious parts of "copy/paste" development. For the hard parts or the time spent thinking about design/flow, it does basically nothing. So am I "10x" overall? Absolutely not. I am barely even "2x" relative to before (since this is a minority of my time).

For example (ChatGPT):

- Prompt:

     Create a HTML select list with the following text values: "First In, Last Out", "Last In, First Out", "Random Order", "Round-Robin" give each option and the select list appropriate names and IDs.
- Result:

     
       First In, Last Out
       Last In, First Out
       Random Order
       Round-Robin
     
Keep in mind if I hand-wrote this I still have to write out the text-values which are 50% of the prompt's length. It did the names/IDs and the boilerplate.

Re: Ask HN: Become a 10x developer with LLM? Myth? Reality?

#4
Reality. ChatGPT has been working fine for me but I have a ton of programming experience so I can easily fix any mistakes. I will be upgrading to plus soon.

Also, Copilot sometimes just does nothing, but there have been many instances now where it literally does exactly what I wanted. It's pretty random.

Re: Ask HN: Become a 10x developer with LLM? Myth? Reality?

#6
See https://simonwillison.net/2023/Mar/27/ai-enhanced-developmen...

> What stack are they using? I am thinking it's pretty much any LLM (GPT-3/GPT-4), Lang chain with GPT Index.

I'm skeptical of any 'stack' that isn't just ChatGPT + GPT-4. It's probably whatever their flash in the pan startup is building right now. To me this seems like a horrible time to build up such a stack (personal or otherwise) rather than just getting proficient at ChatGPT and the plain old OpenAI API while waiting for new stuff like plugins to come out.

Personally I just have a go-to tech stack for GPT-based projects, composed of python, poetry, datasette, and click CLI's written by GPT-4 that can call out to OpenAI in order to manipulate databases (to then be viewed in datasette). But this is more for building little demos to try out GPT rather than incorporating into other work. Otherwise I just use ChatGPT alone. But TBH I'm far from 10x.

Re: Ask HN: Become a 10x developer with LLM? Myth? Reality?

#8
It helps with the tedious tasks but great programmers are great because of the way they approach and solve problems, not because they write code faster.

On a sidenote: You shouldn't take anything said in the "all in podcast" more seriously than a political discussion overheard a saturday night in a bar. Be careful with the halo effect.

Re: Ask HN: Become a 10x developer with LLM? Myth? Reality?

#10

It gives me faster access to documentation/Stackoverflow, and creates bespoke templates. So I am "10x" but for the most tedious parts of "copy/paste" development. For the hard parts or the time spent thinking about design/flow, it does basically nothing. So am I "10x" overall? Absolutely not. I am barely even "2x" relative to before (since this is a minority of my time). For example (ChatGPT): - Prompt: Create a HTML…

To achieve 10x you need to learn exactly how lazy you can be and get the same results :P

me:

html select list of orderings: fifo, random, rr, lifo

GPT-4:

To create an HTML select list with different orderings, such as FIFO (First In, First Out), Random, RR (Round Robin), and LIFO (Last In, First Out), you can use the following HTML code:

    
    
    
        
        
        Select List of Orderings
    
    
        
            Choose an ordering method:
            
                FIFO (First In, First Out)
                Random
                RR (Round Robin)
                LIFO (Last In, First Out)
            
            Submit
        
    
    
This code creates a simple HTML page with a form containing a select list. The user can choose one of the ordering methods from the list, and the selected value can be submitted with the form.

---

OK not exactly the same but just wanted to GPT-golf it. When lazymaxing for real, I just try to keep in mind that ChatGPT is already fine-tuned to include certain things, like following proper conventions, explaining its steps, commenting code. And that most of the time it'll make an educated guess rather than looking at me going "huh?" if it's unsure - so if there's really only 1 reasonable interpretation of terse instructions, I can drop the human-friendly cruft text.

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