51–60 of 78 posts
Appreciate this. But. Do whatever you want. That’s an option too. Make a dumb thing, take your hands off the wheel, have fun. It’s your computer.
Articles like this make one think of John Henry vs. the steam drill. John Henry beat the steam drill, once, and died. Soon, there was a better steam drill. "Vibe coding" is only a few months old. ChatGPT was released less than three years ago. The singularity is just getting started. History of computer chess: - 1957 - early programs that played chess very badly. Excessive optimism - 1967 - programs that play amateur…
Chess is a bad example. Even a "stupid" computer that is sufficiently powerful can just brute-force-search its way to a win. There's nothing special here, it's basically just deeper and deeper search. Put another way. the limitation was always about sufficiently powerful hardware. I'm not sure the same can be said about LLMs.
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I can easily get a month of work done in a single day yes. So probably the 30x is about the current max, and 50x was hyperbole, because I didn't add it up before doing that post.
I just don't believe this. It's weird; I just don't know where folks are getting these extreme productivity gains from. For example, the other day I asked a major LLMs to generate a simple markdown viewer with automatic section indentation for me in Node.js. The basic code worked after a few additional prompts from me. Now I wanted folding. That was also done by the LLM. And then when I tried to add a few additional…
I'm using VSCode Github Copilot in "Agent Mode", btw. It's able to navigate around an entire project, understand it, and work on it. You just lean back and watch it open files, edit them, show you in realtime what it's thought process is, as it does everything, etc. etc. It's truly like magic.
Any other way of doing development, in 2025, is like being in the stone ages.
Articles like this make one think of John Henry vs. the steam drill. John Henry beat the steam drill, once, and died. Soon, there was a better steam drill. "Vibe coding" is only a few months old. ChatGPT was released less than three years ago. The singularity is just getting started. History of computer chess: - 1957 - early programs that played chess very badly. Excessive optimism - 1967 - programs that play amateur…
Chess is a bad example. Even a "stupid" computer that is sufficiently powerful can just brute-force-search its way to a win. There's nothing special here, it's basically just deeper and deeper search. Put another way. the limitation was always about sufficiently powerful hardware. I'm not sure the same can be said about LLMs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One good prompt into Github Copilot 'Agent Mode' (running Claude 4) asking for a new feature can often result in up to 5 to 7 files being generated, and a total of 1000 lines of code being written. Your math is wrong. That's hours of work I didn't do, that only took me the time of describing the new feature with a paragraph of text.
It's ridiculous to equate lines of code to amount of engineering work or value. A massive amount of valuable work can result in a few lines of code. Conversely a millions lines of code can be useless or even have negative value.
An experienced developer can generate tons of great code 30x faster with an Agent, with each function/module still being written using the least amount of code possible.
But you're right, the measure of good code isn't 'N', it's '1/N' (inverse), where N is number of lines of code to do something. The best code is [almost] always that with the least amount of lines, as long as you haven't sacrificed readability in order to remove lines, which I see a lot of juniors do. Rule of thumb is: "Least amount of easily understood LOC". If someone can't look at your code for the first time, and tell what it's doing, that's normally an indication it's not good code. Claude [almost] never breaks any of these rules.
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If you get a 30x gain then you're a 0.05x developer. a 50x gain would literally mean you could get a year's worth of work done in a week. Preposterous.
Bad/dumb developers don't get much of a boost in my experience working with a plethora of shitty contractors. Good developers aren't getting a 30x boost I don't think, but they are getting more out of the tooling than bad developers. The bottleneck is still finding good developers, even with the current generation of AI tooling in play.
The amount of pushback I got on this thread tells me most devs simply haven't started using actual Agents yet.
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I just don't believe this. It's weird; I just don't know where folks are getting these extreme productivity gains from. For example, the other day I asked a major LLMs to generate a simple markdown viewer with automatic section indentation for me in Node.js. The basic code worked after a few additional prompts from me. Now I wanted folding. That was also done by the LLM. And then when I tried to add a few additional…
I'll spend like 10 minutes crafting a prompt that explains a new feature to be added to my app. I explain it in enough detail, with zero ambiguity, such that any human [senior] developer could do it. Often the result is 100s of lines of code generated, and well over 95% of the time the code "Claude 4" generates is exactly what I wanted. I'm using VSCode Github Copilot in "Agent Mode", btw. It's able to navigate aroun…
Anything beyond that and LLMs require a lot of hand holding, and frequently regress to boot
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It's ridiculous to equate lines of code to amount of engineering work or value. A massive amount of valuable work can result in a few lines of code. Conversely a millions lines of code can be useless or even have negative value.
It's all about the quality of your prompts (i.e. your skill at writing clear unambiguous instructions with correct terminologies). An experienced developer can generate tons of great code 30x faster with an Agent, with each function/module still being written using the least amount of code possible. But you're right, the measure of good code isn't 'N', it's '1/N' (inverse), where N is number of lines of code to do so…
Well it does for me, frequently. An example is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44126962
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Chess is a bad example. Even a "stupid" computer that is sufficiently powerful can just brute-force-search its way to a win. There's nothing special here, it's basically just deeper and deeper search. Put another way. the limitation was always about sufficiently powerful hardware. I'm not sure the same can be said about LLMs.
How do you not see its still just deeper and deeper search?