481–490 of 501 posts
It is 80/20 again - it gets you 80% of the way in 20% of the time and then you spend 80% of the time to get the rest of the 20% done. And since it always feels like it is almost there, sunk-cost fallacy comes into play as well and you just don't want to give up. I think an approach that I tried recently is to use it as a friction remover instead of a solution provider. I do the programming but use it to remove pebble…
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> LLMs, especially at the scale we see today The OP qualifies how the marketing cycle for this product is beyond extreme, and its own category. Normal people are being told to worry about AI ending the world, or all jobs disappearing. Simply saying “the problem is the user”, without acknowledging the degree of hype, and expectation setting, the is irresponsible.
AI marketing isn't extreme - not on the LLM vendor side, at least; the hype is generated downstream of it, for various reasons. And it's not the marketing that's saying "you're using it wrong" - it's other users . So, unless you believe everyone reporting good experience with LLMs is a paid shill, there might actually be some merit to it.
Here's the full paper, which has a lot of details missing from the summary linked above: https://metr.org/Early_2025_AI_Experienced_OS_Devs_Study.pdf My personal theory is that getting a significant productivity boost from LLM assistance and AI tools has a much steeper learning curve than most people expect. This study had 16 participants, with a mix of previous exposure to AI tools - 56% of them had never used Curso…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
AI marketing isn't extreme - not on the LLM vendor side, at least; the hype is generated downstream of it, for various reasons. And it's not the marketing that's saying "you're using it wrong" - it's other users . So, unless you believe everyone reporting good experience with LLMs is a paid shill, there might actually be some merit to it.
You have to be pretty native to think VC’s don’t astroturf forums and let random mobs steer discussions about their investments. Even dinosaurs like Microsoft have been caught doing exactly that many time. Including fake “letters to the editor” campaigns when newspapers were a thing
Here's the full paper, which has a lot of details missing from the summary linked above: https://metr.org/Early_2025_AI_Experienced_OS_Devs_Study.pdf My personal theory is that getting a significant productivity boost from LLM assistance and AI tools has a much steeper learning curve than most people expect. This study had 16 participants, with a mix of previous exposure to AI tools - 56% of them had never used Curso…
Hey Simon -- thanks for the detailed read of the paper - I'm a big fan of your OS projects! Noting a few important points here: 1. Some prior studies that find speedup do so with developers that have similar (or less!) experience with the tools they use. In other words, the "steep learning curve" theory doesn't differentially explain our results vs. other results. 2. Prior to the study, 90+% of developers had reasona…
I think one would have to compare the difficulty level of tasks.
I speculate that on easy tasks, LLM's can do a great job based on their training data alone, so you'd experience a speedup regardless of your prompt engineering skill level. But on large codebases and for complex tasks, an LLM cannot stand on it's own legs, and the differentiator becomes the quality of the prompt.
I think you'd need not only expert programmers, but expert programmers who have become expert prompt engineers(you would need some kind of extensive system prompt describing how the large codebase works), and those don't really exist yet, I think.
For certain tasks it can speed me up 30x compared to an expert in the space: https://rust-gpu.github.io/blog/2025/06/24/vulkan-shader-por...
This is very disingenuous: we don't know how much spare time Sascha spent, and much of that time was likely spent learning, experimenting, and reporting issues to Slang.
Here's the full paper, which has a lot of details missing from the summary linked above: https://metr.org/Early_2025_AI_Experienced_OS_Devs_Study.pdf My personal theory is that getting a significant productivity boost from LLM assistance and AI tools has a much steeper learning curve than most people expect. This study had 16 participants, with a mix of previous exposure to AI tools - 56% of them had never used Curso…
I find the very popular response of "you're just not using it right" to be big copout for LLMs, especially at the scale we see today. It's hard to think of any other major tech product where it's acceptable to shift so much blame on the user. Typically if a user doesn't find value in the product, we agree that the product is poorly designed/implemented, not that the user is bad. But AI seems somehow exempt from this…
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Greenfield is still such a tiny percentage of all software work going on in the world though :/
It’s a tiny percentage of software work because the programming is slow, and setting up new projects is even slower. It’s been a majority of my projects for the past two months. Not because work changed, but because I’ve written a dozen tiny, personalised tools that I wouldn’t have written at all if I didn’t have Claude to do it. Most of them were completed in less than an hour, to give you an idea of the size. Thoug…
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Code reuse at scale: 80 + 80 = 160% ~ phi...coincidence? I think this may become a long horizon harvest for the rigorous OOP strategy, may Bill Joy be disproved. Gray goo may not [taste] like steel-cut oatmeal.
1.6x multiplier is low, we usually need to apply 5x