My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

THANK YOU.

I was a 3-4x programmer before. Now I’m a 9-15x programmer when wrangling LLMs.

This is a sea change and it’s already into “incredible” territory and shows no signs of slowing down.

> Think of anything you wanted to build but didn’t. You tried to home in on some first steps. If you’d been in the limerent phase of a new programming language, you’d have started writing. But you weren’t, so you put it off, for a day, a year, or your whole career.

I have been banging out little projects that I have wanted to exist for years but always had on the back burner. Write a detailed readme and ask the agent to interrogate you about the missing parts of the spec then update the README. Then have it make a TODO and start implementing. Give it another code base for style guide.

I’ve made more good and useful and working code in the last month than I have in the last two years.

A well articulated blog, imo. Touches on all the points I see argued about on LinkedIn all the time.

I think leveling things out at the beginning is important. For instance, I recently talked to a senior engineer who said "using AI to write programming is so useless", but then said they'd never heard of Cursor. Which is fine - but I so often see strong vocal stances against using AI tools but then referring to early Copilot days or just ChatGPT as their experience, and the game has changed so much since then.

One thing that I find truly amazing is just the simple fact that you can now be fuzzy with the input you give a computer, and get something meaningful in return. Like, as someone who grew up learning to code in the 90s it always seemed like science fiction that we'd get to a point where you could give a computer some vague human level instructions and get it more or less do what you want.

It's been so much more rewarding playing with AI coding tools on my own than through the subtle and not so subtle nudges at work. The work AI tools are a walled garden, have a shitty interface, feel made to extract from me than to help me. In my personal stuff, downloading models, playing with them, the tooling, the interactions, it all been so much more rewarding to give me stable comfortable workflows I can rely on and that work with my brain.

The dialog around it is so adversarial it's been hard figuring out how to proceed until dedicating a lot of effort to diving into the field myself, alone, on my personal time and learned what's comfortable to use it on.

> I was a 3-4x programmer before. Now I’m a 9-15x programmer

What the fuck does this mean?