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LLMs can be exhausting

tomjohnell.com

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Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the "actual studies" was pretty much grabbing developers off the street and telling them to "use AI to make things go fast". And to no-one's surprise there was no increase in velocity. I'd really like to see a study using people of similar skill level where one group doesn't use AI and never has and the other have been working with AI tooling for a year or more.

> you just need AI certification and over five years experience in AI coding stacks to make use of this The trillions of dollars of capitalization wasn't based off a promise of "a new IDE that lets you write code slightly faster once you get over the learning curve".

That's just marketing.

AI is a force multiplier, or even an exponent if used correctly.

For regular folk with a skill of 1.01 it gives them the slight bump in speed and knowledge they need to get their ideas into some kind of MVP form.

But if you know what you're doing and work with it, you can get crazy amounts of stuff done - mostly the things you wouldn't have bothered to do at all because of the time investment required.

I've got so many tiny apps running that do specifically what I need, before I would have had to use someone else's "product" for it with a massive amount of useless (to me) features when I just need the one.

I just a few weeks ago simplified a whole massive open source webapp to a single dockerized ~300 line Python script that does the specific bit I want and it's been working flawlessly ever since. I never need to worry about enshittification or pivoting or the original creator adding AI slopped features (and security holes).

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#232
post #3

I find LLMs so much more exhausting than manual coding. It’s interesting. I think you quickly bump into how much a single human can feasibly keep track of pretty fast with modern LLMs. I assume until LLMs are 100% better than humans in all cases, as long as I have to be in the loop there will be a pretty hard upper bound on what I can do and it seems like we’ve roughly hit that limit. Funny enough, I get this feeling…

I think the upper limit is your ability to decide what to build among infinite possibilities. How should it work, what should it be like to use it, what makes the most sense, etc. The code part is trivial and a waste of time in some ways compared to time spent making decisions about what to build. And sometimes even a procrastination to avoid thinking about what to build, like how people who polish their game engine…

This hits home for me. Lawyer, not developer here. Implementation was never a hard part for me, it was an impossible part. Now that the time/cost needed to experiment with prototypes has dropped to near zero I've been been spending a lot of time doing exactly what you describe (steering, brainstorming). I find it fun but I do it mainly as a bunch of personal side projects. Can understand how it might feel different for users when the stakes are much higher (like when it's part of the day-to-day in a real job).
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