[HN Gopher] How much are LLMs boosting real-world programmer pro...
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How much are LLMs boosting real-world programmer productivity?
Author : gatinsama
Score : 53 points
Date : 2025-03-08 18:17 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.lesswrong.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.lesswrong.com)
| techpineapple wrote:
| The one example I can think of of real world developer getting
| seemingly 10x improvement is Pieter levels coding a 3D
| multiplayer flight sim in a few days vibe coding. I tried vibe
| coding with cursor and mostly ran into simple roadblock after
| simple roadblock, I'm curious to watch some unedited videos of
| people working this way.
| colecut wrote:
| That has been a pretty wild development to watch..
|
| I've been following him for a while, it's interesting what a
| polarizing figure he is..
|
| a recent comment on his X feed resonated with quite a few
| people
|
| "I've never seen an account that feels inspirational and makes
| me want to kill myself simultaneously"
|
| He is definitely an entrepreneur/business man first and a
| developer second.. He has taught himself the skills to
| minimally get the job done functionally, has decent eye for
| design, and knows how to market... He makes it blatantly
| obvious, moreso than usual, that sales and marketing are way
| more important to making money than doing things technically
| "the right way".. At least on these smaller scale things
| because he only knows how to work by himself.
|
| People hate that he's figured out how to make tens of thousands
| of dollars from a game that is arguably worse than hundreds of
| games that make nothing... I see that as just another skill
| that can be learned. And it is cool how transparent he is about
| his operations.
|
| But yes, even with his blueprints it is hard to replicate his
| successes, my attempt of "one shotting" a video game was not
| very impressive..
| manmal wrote:
| He's basically jumping from hype to hype, riding the
| forefront wave of attention, funneling it into his wallet. I
| think he's extremely intelligent and quick also, both of
| which are necessary to do this. I wouldn't be able to.
| ge96 wrote:
| The last thing I saw him working on was AI generated
| people/avatars.
|
| Yeah he was/is a big name for digital nomad, I used to
| quote his figured like $70K/mo I bet it's more now.
|
| I think remotok is written in PHP and jQuery (example of
| makes money, tech is not fancy)
| techpineapple wrote:
| I think it's a little weird to say he made 10's of thousands
| from a game and in curious if it will last. Is the game good?
| I logged into the game and just thought to myself, holy
| billboards Batman!
|
| He made 10's of thousands from advertising right? It feels
| like most of what the does the lesson is if you follow the
| steps I take you can be an entrepreneur too which is mostly
| true, with the game it feels like, if you develop a following
| of millions and then create something that leaps to the front
| of the hype train people may give you money for a while.
| Which doesn't feel like what most people are hoping from
| "vibe coding a game can make you 60k/month."
|
| But no shade to him.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| The fact of the matter is, unless you're doing cutting edge
| work, you dont need to be a great programmer or "write good
| code" to be successful.
|
| That's why it's mind blowing to me when devs say AI writes
| bad code. For the most part, who cares?
| mentalgear wrote:
| I found that AI might help with analysis, but the generation part
| severely lacks and overall results in just too much effort to
| clean up and check the code afterwards then just writing it
| yourself.
|
| At least for mid- to high- complex projects.
|
| Vibe coding might be fun but ultimately results in unmaintainable
| code.
| mikeocool wrote:
| What's that old (and in my experience pretty accurate) adage? The
| last 10% of a software project takes 90% of the time?
|
| In my experience, AI is helpful for that first 90% -- when the
| codebase is pretty simple, and all of the weird business logic
| edge cases haven't crept in. In the last 10%(as well as most
| "legacy" codebases), it seems to have a lot trouble understanding
| enough to generate helpful output at more than a basic level.
|
| Furthermore, if you're not deliberate with your AI usage, it
| really gets you into "this code is too complicated for the AI to
| be much help with" territory a lot faster.
|
| I'd imagine this is part of why we're not seeing an explosion of
| software productivity.
| javajosh wrote:
| Yeah, I've been disappointed in a lot of code generation within
| my field of expertise. However, if I need to whip up some bash
| scripts, AI works very well. But if I want those bash scripts
| to be actually good, AI just can't get there. It certainly
| cannot "think outside the box" and deliver anything close to
| novel or even elegant (although it may give some tactical help
| writing boilerplate lightly adapted to your codebase). The
| analogy I use is that LLM AIs are like a new car mechanic tool
| that can generate any nut, bolt or gasket, for free and
| instantly (just add electricity!). It's great addition to the
| toolset for a seasoned mechanic, distracting for a junior, and
| is not even in the same universe required to fix an entire car,
| let alone design one.
| EliRivers wrote:
| Every so often, it saves me a few hours on a task that's not very
| difficult, but that I just don't know how to do already.
| Generally something generic a lot of people have already done.
|
| An example from today was using XAudio2 on windows to output
| sound, where that sound was already being fetched as interleaved
| data from a network source. I could have read the docs, found
| some example code, and bashed it together in a few hours; but I
| asked one of the LLMs and it gave me some example code tuned to
| my request, giving me a head start on that.
|
| I had to already know a lot of context to be able to ask it the
| right questions, I suspect, and to thence tune it with a few
| follow up questions.
| rectang wrote:
| The biggest timesaver for me so far is composing complex SQL
| queries with elements of SQL I don't use very often. In such
| cases I know what I want, but the specific syntax eludes me.
| Previously solving that has required poring over documentation
| and QA sites, but finding the right documentation and gradually
| debugging is tedious. An LLM gets me farther along.
| cmrx64 wrote:
| https://chatgpt.com/share/67cca4ac-2a38-8000-9901-9f56219c06...
|
| ... was curious what Gpt-4.5 would do with an absolute paucity
| of context :)
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Same here. I had to write a DynamicObject for a DSL-like system
| in C# to make it behave like Python dicts.
|
| With some LLM help I was done before lunch. After lunch I wrote
| some additional unit tests and improved on the solution - again
| with LLM help (the object type changes in unit tests vs
| integration tests, one is the actual type, one is a
| JsonDocument).
|
| I could've definitely done all that by myself, but when the LLM
| wrote the boilerplate crap that someone had definitely written
| before (but in a way I couldn't find with a search engine) I
| could focus on testing and optimising the solution instead of
| figuring out C# DynamicObject quirks.
| dvh wrote:
| I stopped using stack overflow altogether. It require to write
| very careful question not to get removed, with LLM I write 1
| sentence, then few to narrow it down as needed. It could easily
| be 1 minute llm vs. writing SO post for 20 minutes and waiting 30
| minutes for response. It also saves googling time because
| googling query often must be more generic to be effective so I
| then have to spend more time adjusting found solution, llm often
| gives specific answer.
|
| The moment I realized llm are better was when I needed to do
| something with screen coordinates of point clouds in three.js and
| my searches lead nowhere, doing it myself would take me 1 or 2
| hours, the llm got correct working code on first try.
| rectang wrote:
| I have not stopped referencing Stack Overflow (though I have
| almost never asked questions there). I still find it more
| helpful for exploring approaches and ideas than an LLM. An LLM
| is most helpful when I definitely know what I want, I just
| don't know the specific incantation.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| For me it works pretty well for python scripts that pull data
| from somewhere and do something with it. Even the code quality is
| quite ok often. But for larger complex projects it doesn't work
| for me. It produces a lot of unmaintainable code.
|
| But I can easily see a not so distant future where you don't even
| have to look at the code anymore and just let AI do its thing.
| Similar to us not checking the assembly instructions of compiled
| code.
| atq2119 wrote:
| You don't have to check the assembly instructions of compiled
| code because armies of compiler engineers sweat the details of
| making damn sure that every single step of compilation is done
| by algorithms that are correct. And they fail often enough.
|
| I'm not saying that what you claim is entirely impossible, but
| it would require some major inventions and a very different
| approach to how ML is implemented and used compared to what's
| happening today. And I'm not convinced that the economics for
| that are there.
| rectang wrote:
| An LLM is not a compiler, where extreme pains are taken to be
| correct and consistent. LLM coding output will not always need
| to be checked, depending on the use case, but it definitely
| will not be consistently correct across _all_ use cases.
| patrick451 wrote:
| I never use them to generate code for languages that I know well.
| Google has started trying to answer my programming related
| searches with LLM results. Half the time it points me a useful
| direction, the other half it's just dead wrong.
|
| I have found them pretty helpful writing sql. But I don't really
| know sql very well and I'd imagine that somebody who does could
| write what I need in far less time that it takes me with the LLM.
| While the LLM helps finish my sql task faster, the downside is
| that I'm not really learning it in the same way I would if I had
| to actually bang my head against the wall and understand the
| docs. In the long run, I'd be better off without it.
| sumoboy wrote:
| Like a new diet every week, not everyone is losing weight. Great
| for snippets, suggestions, and helping with errors. But a long
| ways to go before it's more consistent and commonly used.
| simonswords82 wrote:
| Without over complicating it, using AI is currently about 4x
| productivity in mid to senior developers.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| > Without over complicating it, using AI is currently about 4x
| productivity in mid to senior developers.
|
| That is awesome. It means companies can reduce their mid and
| senior dev headcount by 75%!
| simonw wrote:
| Or it means they could double their spend on senior engineers
| and get a 8x boost in output from their team.
|
| Ever seen a company that didn't have a backlog?
| arthurofbabylon wrote:
| Traction - such a useful term. What is the "traction" of LLMs in
| programming? When the rubber hits the road, what happens? Do the
| wheel spin in place, or does the car move forward?
|
| The nice thing about traction is that you can see it. When you
| shovel away the snow in your driveway you can move your car;
| that's nice. When you update your hot water kettle and it boils
| in 30 seconds, that's traction. Traction is a freshly installed
| dishwasher in your kitchen.
|
| I sincerely ask - not because I am skeptical but because I am
| curious - where is the traction with LLMs in software?
| rerdavies wrote:
| Here are the various traction effects I get:
|
| 1) Auto-complete on steroids. My LLM often auto-completes six
| or seven lines of code at a time, and can often infer intent
| from context. Wrong about as often as it is right, but if I had
| written the code myself, I would have been wrong on the first
| cut about as often as my coding assistant is. Somewhere between
| 25% and 60% of all code I write these days is written using TAB
| auto-complete of LLM suggestions. (Sorry I can't be more
| precise, but I use TAB auto-complete a _LOT_ ).
|
| 2) An assistant for writing chunks of code in technologies with
| which I do not have deep expertise. Provides easy entry into
| APIs that I'm not familiar with. My LLM will sketch out the
| framework code required to get some chunk of technology up and
| working. ("Initialize an ALSA MIDI port. Ctrl+I. "and Make it
| initialize the port in RAW mode". "and use camel case for the
| method names". &c). Particularly useful with ancient crusty
| Linux APIs that are short on documentation and examples. My use
| of Stack Exchange has gone to zero (and my use of Reddit).
|
| 3) Writing code for technologies that I have practically zero
| experience with. "Write a bash script that takes the output
| from this program (... format specified...)and use gnuplot to
| generate a graph."; "And display the results in a QT window";
| "And set the title to "cumulative downloads"; "And rotate the
| x-axis labels by 45 degrees."; "and set all the fonts to
| 'Roboto'", &c. (I am for all practical purposes bash-script
| illiterate, and I've never used gnuplot before. I often do
| programming tasks these days that I would not have done before
| because the effort would not have been worthwhile without a
| coding assistant. Making my audio plugins read and write audio
| files in a variety of file format would have take a week, but
| with a coding assistant it took me about half a day. Without a
| coding assistant, I just wouldn't have done it.
|
| 4) Difficult debugging problems! "What's wrong with this code?"
| (That seriously works!) "Why doesn't this code properly recover
| from ALSA buffer underruns?" Doesn't necessarily get the right
| answer; but it will often provide a list of extremely useful
| suggestions. I've encountered several occasions where my coding
| assistant will help me solve difficult bugs that I've been
| working for hours on, one of which I had been working on for
| three or four days.
|
| Of these, I think (2) provides the most productivity boost for
| me. I've often thought that the vast majority of time spent
| programming is spent reading documentation for the APIs you're
| using. Programming is mostly transforming documentation into
| usefulness. I will often write a one-liner saying what I want
| to do, and type ^I. My LLM is spookily good at stuff like that.
| No need to spend 40 minutes reading ffmpeg documenation. No
| need to google for the least toxicly awful code sample on the
| internet. Just, "// Write the audio buffer to an MP3 file using
| ffmpeg" ctrl+I.
|
| Let's be frank; nobody is going to be converting natural
| language to A-list games. But LLMs are a tool. And tools are
| good. And LLM coding assistants are extremely good tools. The
| answer to all of this is: try it, and learn to use the tool,
| and take away what works for you, and get good at recognizing
| when your coding assistant will and will not work.
|
| I get that you're asking because you haven't tried it yet. But
| I guarantee that if you do, you will recognize the traction
| pretty much instantly. It's immediately obvious that the tool
| is useful. And as you use it more and more, and adapt to the
| quirks, it becomes more and more useful.
|
| I'm a professional senior programmer with 40 years of
| experience. I'm pretty sure it roughly doubles my productivity.
| malux85 wrote:
| One of the interesting things about LLM coding assistants is that
| the quality of the answer is significantly influenced by the
| communication skill of the programmer.
|
| Some of the juniors I mentor cannot formulate their questions
| clearly and as a result, get a poor answer. They don't understand
| that an LLM will answer the question you ask, which might not be
| the global best solution, it's just answering your question - and
| if you ask the question poorly (or worse - the wrong question)
| you're going to get bad results.
|
| I have seen significant jumps in senior programmers capabilities,
| in some cases 20x, and when I see a junior or intermediate
| complaining about how useless LLM coding assistants are it always
| makes me very suspicious about the person, in that I think the
| problem is almost certainly their poor communication skills
| causing them to ask the wrong things.
| LouisSayers wrote:
| I agree, if you can communicate effectively AI is a huge
| productivity jump.
|
| Another thing I've found is to actually engineer a solution -
| all the basic coding principles come into play, keeping code
| clean, cohesive and designing it to make testing easy. The
| human part of this is essential as AI has no barometer on when
| it's gone too far with abstraction or not far enough.
|
| When code is broken up into good abstractions then the AI part
| of filling in the gaps is where you see a lot of the
| productivity increases. It's like filling water into an ice
| tray.
| hirsin wrote:
| > I don't see 5-10x more useful features in the software I use,
| or 5-10x more software that's useful to me, or that the software
| I'm using is suddenly working 5-10x better, etc.
|
| This has bad assumptions about what higher productivity looks
| like.
|
| Other alternatives include:
|
| 1. Companies require fewer engineers, so there are layoffs.
| Software products are cheaper than before because the cost to
| build and maintain them is reduced.
|
| 2. Companies require fewer engineers so they lay them off and
| retain the spend, using it as stock buybacks or exec comp.
|
| And certainly it feels like we've seen #2 out in the wild.
|
| Assuming that the number of people working on software you use
| remains constant is not a good assumption.
|
| (Personally this has been my finding. I'm able to get a bit more
| done in my day by eg writing a quick script to do something
| tedious. But not 5x more)
| semanticjudo wrote:
| The author has implied a false dichotomy: positioning the article
| as "it does 10x or it does nothing" (my paraphrasing) is
| disingenuous and hyperbolic. My experience is that on several
| tasks professional devs, including myself, can get to an answer
| much faster than pre-LLM. For example, I've never had to use SQL
| frequently enough to become an expert. Prior to LLMs, creating
| queries beyond the basic would take an hour of Googling and
| keyboard head banging (or find an expert to help who is
| invariably doing their own job). Now, the same thing takes 6
| minutes. Arguably 10x faster for this task. But since I don't do
| this often nor have 40 other examples like this, I'd never claim
| it makes me 10x more productive. But I DO run into 5 or 6 of this
| and similar examples a week and several others of smaller
| magnitude. And that has a meaningful impact on my productivity. I
| could go on to describe in what ways I can see this productivity
| improvement but the primary point is that it is not all or
| nothing. An LLM might make me 20% more productive across my week
| and that is still a big deal when compared with just not having
| it.
| eesmith wrote:
| I don't think the author suggest a 10x-or-bust dichotomy. From
| the end of the piece:
|
| > I expect LLMs have definitely been useful for writing minor
| features or for getting the people inexperienced with
| programming/with a specific library/with a specific codebase
| get started easier and learn faster. They've been useful for me
| in those capacities. But it's probably like a 10-30% overall
| boost, plus flat cost reductions for starting in new domains
| and for some rare one-off projects like "do a trivial
| refactor".
|
| That "10-30% overall boost" matches your "20% more productive"
| pretty well.
| jasonthorsness wrote:
| It has certainly boosted my productivity for my blog. Not the
| articles; but the interactive features. Since my day job is
| mostly Go and C++ I'm less familiar with NextJS/TypeScript/NodeJS
| and the LLMs are tremendously helpful in knowing which libraries
| to use and how to use them correctly. It lets me get way more
| done in the constrained time I have to spend on it.
| jmchuster wrote:
| I see it analogous to asking, "How much is access to the internet
| boosting real-world programmer productivity?" Are you really
| 5-10x more productive being able to google something? Couldn't
| you have just looked it up in the manual, don't you have peers
| you can ask, that's such a small portion of the time you spend
| coding.
|
| But we've now lived it so much that it sounds ridiculous to try
| to argue that the internet doesn't really make _that_ much of a
| difference.
| simonw wrote:
| I'm 20-50x more productive today compared to 25 years ago
| thanks to the internet being full of open source packages that
| solve most of the problems I run into.
|
| Back in the late 1990s I had to build solutions to almost every
| problem from scratch.
| gatinsama wrote:
| I heard a programmer I respect a lot say:
|
| "It's difficult to quantify this, but my guess for a while
| has been that I've had a giant productivity boost in the
| portion of my job which is typing code at a computer. And I
| would estimate I am two to three times more productive,
| faster at turning thoughts into working code, than I was
| before. But that's only 10% of my job."
|
| But this was 5 months ago, pre-Claude 3.7.
| LunaSea wrote:
| Negative productivity for me as I have to review bad LLM code
| during PR reviews.
| barnabee wrote:
| It's extremely circumstantial for me.
|
| Sometimes they give me maybe a 5-10% improvement (i.e. nice but
| not world changing). Usually that's when they're working as an
| alternative to docs, solving the odd bug, helping write tests or
| occasional glue code, etc. for a bigger or more complex/inportant
| solution.
|
| In other cases I've literally built a small functioning app/tool
| in 6-12 hours of elapsed time, where most of that is spent
| waiting (all but unattended, so I guess this counts as "vibe
| coding") while the LLM does its thing. It's probably required
| less than an hour of my time in those cases and would easily have
| taken at least 1-2 days, if not more for me. So I'd say it's at
| least sometimes comfortably 10x.
|
| More to the point, in those cases I simply wouldn't have tried to
| create the tool, knowing how long it'd take. It's unclear what
| the cumulative incremental value of all these new tools and
| possibilities will be, but that's also non-zero.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > Abstract indicators to the tune of "this analysis shows Y% more
| code has been produced in the last quarter". (This can just
| indicate AI producing code slop/bloat).
|
| I suspect the metrics you sometimes hear like "x% of new code was
| written by an LLM" are being oversold because they're reported by
| people interested in juicing the numbers, so they count
| boilerplate, lines IDE autocomplete would have figured out, and
| lines that had to be fixed.
| furstenheim wrote:
| I find it useful to find esoteric APIs, like reflection, which
| normally has 100 methods and hard to find the right one
| KaiserPro wrote:
| Disclaimer: I work at a FAANG with exceptionally good integration
| of LLM into my IDE.
|
| For me its been a everso slight net positive.
|
| In terms of in-IDE productivity it has improved a little bit.
| Stuff that is mostly repetitive can be autocompleted by the LLM.
| It can, in some cases provide function names from other files
| that traditional intelliCode can't do because of codebase size.
|
| However it also hallucinates plausible shit, which significantly
| undermines the productivity gains above.
|
| I suspect that if I ask it directly to create a function to do X,
| it might work better. rather than expecting it to work like
| autocomplete (even though I comment my code much more than my
| peers)
|
| over all rating: for our code base, its not as good as c#
| intelliCode/VS code.
|
| Where it is good is asking how I do some basic thing in $language
| that I have forgotten. Anything harder and it start going into
| bullshit land.
|
| I think if you have more comprehensive tests it works better.
|
| I have not had much success with agentic workflow, mainly because
| I've not been using the larger models. (Our internal agentic
| workflow is limited access)
| technofiend wrote:
| That's been my experience: it's good at basic tasks. It can be
| prompted to write idiomatic code in very small amounts.
| Anything beyond that and it's just as likely to either write
| non-optimal code or silently delete code while trying to
| satisfy your ask.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _I suspect that if I ask it directly to create a function to
| do X_
|
| This is how LLMs are most effective, and also the reason why I
| don't believe non programmers will be crushing code. You do
| actually need to know how to program.
| IshKebab wrote:
| That's sort of my experience too. It's really good at _some_
| auto-complete (especially copying patterns already in your
| code). For example if you write some cross product function it
| will easily auto-complete the equations after seeing one. It 's
| obviously not as good as intellisense where that works.
|
| And it's really good for basic stuff in things you don't want
| to have to look up. E.g. "write me JavaScript to delete all DOM
| nodes with class 'foo'".
|
| I reckon you're underestimating how much time that saves
| though. The auto-complete saves me a few seconds many times a
| day. Maybe 2-3 minutes a day. A whole day in one year.
|
| The "write me some shitty script" stuff saves _much_ more time.
| Sometimes maybe an hour. That 's rarer but even one a month
| that's still a whole day in a year.
|
| Maybe 2 days in a year doesn't seem significant but given the
| low cost of these AI tools I think any company is self-harming
| if they don't pay for them for everyone.
|
| (Also I think the hallucination isn't that bad once you get
| used to it.)
| throwawa14223 wrote:
| I've had terrible luck getting LLMs to make me feel more
| productive.
|
| Copilot is very good at breaking my flow and all of the agent
| based systems I have tried have been disappointing at following
| incredibly simple instructions.
|
| Coding is much easier and faster than writing instructions in
| English so it is hard to justify anything i have seen so far as a
| time saver.
| avastmick wrote:
| I'm a solo founder/developer (https://kayshun.co) my
| relationship/usage of LLMs for codegen has been complicated.
|
| At first I was all in with Copilot and various similar plugins
| for neovim. It helped me get going but did produce the worst code
| in the application. Also I found (personal preference) that the
| autocomplete function actually slowed me down; it made me pause
| or even prevented me from seeing what I was doing rather than
| just typing out what I needed to. I stopped using any codegen for
| about four months at the end of 2024; I felt it was not making me
| more productive.
|
| This year it's back on the table with avante[0] and cursor (the
| latter back off the table due to the huge memory requirements).
| Then recently Claude Code dropped and I am currently feeling like
| I have productivity super powers. I've set it up in a pair
| programming style (old XP coder) where I write careful specs
| (prompts) and tests (which I code); it writes code; I review run
| the tests and commit. I work with it. I do not just let it just
| run as I have found I waste more time unwinding its output than
| watching each step.
|
| From being pretty disillusioned six months ago I can now see it
| as a powerful tool.
|
| Can it replace devs? In my opinion, some. Like all things it's
| garbage in garbage out. So the idea a non-technical product
| manager can produce quality outputs seems unlikely to me.
|
| 0: https://github.com/yetone/avante.nvim
| simonbarker87 wrote:
| Similar to me with CoPilot, I found it made it harder for me to
| spin up my brain to full power to tackle a genuinely tricky
| problem because I was letting it solve the simple ones for me.
| I stopped using it after about 3 months and had a total pause
| from CodeGen tools. Now I use Claude like a very documentation-
| knowledgeable junior developer who can write code very quickly.
| I guide it on the architecture and approach and sanity check
| what it does but let it save me a tonne of typing. I don't use
| it for everything but as a CTO for an early stage startup that
| needs to turn somethings around quickly it's incredibly useful.
| lfsh wrote:
| As search engine LLMs are nice. But for code generation they are
| not. Everytime it generates code there are small bugs that I
| don't notice directly but will bite me later.
|
| For example a peace of code with a foreach loop that uses the
| collection name inside the loop instead of the item name.
|
| Or a very nice looking peace of code but with a method call that
| does not exist in the used library.
|
| I think the weakness of AI/LMMs is that it outputs probabilities.
| If the code you request is very common than it will probably
| generate good code. But that's about it. It can not reason about
| code (it maybe can 'reason' about the probability of the
| generated answer).
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| For me the biggest boost has been for front-end code. I have
| never considered front-end development, real development and the
| whole madness of next.js components which somebody wants to write
| or add and all of the CSS animations and designs and some of the
| tailwind class madness I let AI handle.
|
| That stuff is already a mess so the AI slop that comes out is
| also messy and that's fine as long as it looks good and performs
| well. and does what I want and it's also really trivial to
| change.
|
| However, I'm not letting it come near any backend code or actual
| development.
| jdlshore wrote:
| Front-end code _is_ real development. It's the part of your
| system that users interact with, and the part that has the most
| influence on people's perceptions of your work. It's also very
| fiddly and full of edge cases, precisely because it interacts
| with human beings.
|
| If you think of it as "not real," of course you'll end up with
| a mess. But that says as much about your choices as it does
| about front-end development.
| summarity wrote:
| One of my teams at GitHub develops Copilot Autofix, which
| suggests fixes based on CodeQL alerts (another of my teams'
| projects). Based on data of actual devs interacting with alerts
| and fixes, we see an average 3x speed up in time to fix over no
| Autofix, and up to 12x for some bug types. There's more were
| doing but the theme I'm seeing is that lots of the friction
| points along the SDLC get accelerated.
| janwillemb wrote:
| I was in a school team where we had to create documents
| describing a new curriculum. One of the members thought creating
| these docs using a LLM was a very easy and productive way of
| doing it. But it absolutely wasn't. It looked alright at the
| start, but on closer inspection it was just a load of BS. We had
| to change literally every single sentence to let the text make
| sense. I also was in a team that created tools we could use for
| our students. Again one of the members used a LLM to create
| certain tools. At first glance they worked alright, until some
| change was needed. Refactoring wasn't possible - a total rewrite
| was the only thing that helped. I don't think LLM boosts
| productivity. At best it boosts the _appearance_ of productivity
| of one person, and then the others have to clean up after her.
| bufordtwain wrote:
| I'd guess maybe 10-20% improvement for me.
| havaloc wrote:
| I write plain jane PHP/MySQL crud apps that people love for work,
| including a fitness center membership system.
|
| Writing a new view used to take 5-10 minutes but now I can do it
| in 30 seconds. Since it's the most basic PHP/MySql imaginable it
| works very well, none of those frameworks to confuse the LLM or
| suck up the context window.
|
| The point is I guess that I can do it the old fashioned way
| because I know how, but I don't have to, I can tell ChatGPT
| exactly what I want, and how I want it.
| e12e wrote:
| I'd be very interested to see a transcript or two of such a 30
| second interaction, if you have any you could share?
| jit_hacker wrote:
| I work at a popular Seattle tech company. and AI is being shoved
| down our throats by leadership. to the point it was made known
| they're tracking how much devs use AI and I've even been asked
| when I'm personally not using it more. and I've long been a
| believer in using the right tool for the right job. And sometimes
| it's AI, but not super often
|
| I spent a lot of time trying to think about how we arrived here.
| where I work there are a lot of Senior Directors and SVPs who
| used to write code 10+ years ago. Who if you would ask them to
| build a little hack project they would have no idea where to
| start. And AI has given them back something they've lost because
| they can build something simple super quickly. But they fail to
| see that just because it accelerates their hack project, it won't
| accelerate someone who's an expert. i.e. AI might help a hobbyist
| plant a garden, but it wouldn't help a farmer squeeze out more
| yield.
| lolinder wrote:
| > just because it accelerates their hack project, it won't
| accelerate someone who's an expert.
|
| I would say that this is the wrong distinction. I'm an expert
| who's still in the code every day, and AI _still_ accelerates
| my hack projects that I do in my spare time, but only to a
| point. When I hit 10k lines of code then code generation with
| chat models becomes substantially less useful (though
| autocomplete /Cursor-style advanced autocomplete retains its
| value).
|
| I think the distinction that matters is the _type_ of project
| being worked on. Greenfield stuff--whether a hobby project or a
| business project--can see real benefits from AI. But eventually
| the process of working on the code becomes far more about
| understanding the complex interactions between the dozens to
| hundreds of components that are already written than it is
| about getting a fresh chunk of code onto the screen. And AI
| models--even embedded in fancy tools like Cursor--are still
| objectively _terrible_ at understanding the kinds of complex
| interactions between systems and subsystems that professional
| developers deal with day in and day out.
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