That's because the reality is somewhere in the middle. It obviously isn't 100x or even 10x except for very specific toy tasks, but for me it's probably around ~1.5-2x in everyday work. And I work on mostly long-tail scientific stuff, I imagine it's more if you do something like frontend dev with a lot of boilerplate. I'm absolutely convinced that people who say LLMs are not making them more productive either don't understand how to use them correctly, or they are working on very specific niche problems/infrastructure where they aren't useful.
2x may not sound like much compared to what you read in the media, but if a few years ago you had told companies that you can provably make their engineers even 2x more productive on average you'd probably be swimming in billions of dollars now. That kind of productivity increase is absolutely huge.
> I'm absolutely convinced that people who say LLMs are not making them more productive either don't understand how to use them correctly, or they are working on very specific niche problems/infrastructure where they aren't useful
I understand how to use LLMs, it's just a much worse workflow. Writing code isn't the hard part, reviewing code is much slower and painful process than writing it from scratch, when you actually know what you're doing.
I'm absolutely convinced that people who are saying LLMs are making them more productive either weren't very productive to begin with or they don't know what they're doing enough to realize what a bad job the LLM is doing
Where's the actual evidence for the productivity boost though? Wouldn't one expect a huge increase in valuable software products or a dramatic increase in open source contributions if llms provide this kind of productivity increase?
It's really hard to measure. Sure, maybe 20-30% of the time I get a perfect autocomplete and boom, 2x speedup. Then there is the partially correct or completely incorrect suggestions that tools like Cursor keep spamming, making me either accept by mistake or continuously rage hit the escape key, which both slows things down and breaks the thinking flow.
How do you account for the latter? It's nearly impossible and I have seen no improvement in that realm. As the good suggestions have become better, the ratio of good to bad hasn't really changed for me.
If it really is 2x in general, we would have noticed.
LLM are useful to me personally as a learning tool. It’s valuable to have it talk through something or explain why something is designed a certain way. So it’s definitely helped me grow as an engineer. But I have not come close to being 2x as productive, I don’t think my workload would be done by 2 people in the pre-LLM era. Maybe 1.25?
Because for the most part being a computer programmer is not about programming the computer but about… everything else.
Overall, LLM are a net negative for humanity in my opinion. The amount of slop on the internet now is absurd. I can never be sure if I’m reading the writing of a real person or a machine, which makes me feel like I’m slowly becoming brain poisoned by the devil himself on a psychological level. I have to think twice when I read any email longer than 2 paragraphs, or did my coworker start using more em dashes?
And also if it’s so damn easy for a machine to do all of this complex valuable work for a few kilojoules how complex or valuable is it anyway? Maybe it’s all just a fiction, that any of this stuff provides any value to anyone. Is another app really actually necessary? What about a hundred million new apps?! Even if we all became 100x as “productive,” what would that actually mean, in the real world you know the one that’s outside that has smells and textures and objects and people in it talking to one another face to face with their wet vocal chords??
These things are going to drive us all absolutely insane I can guarantee it. The logical end of this is complete madness.
"That kind of productivity increase is absolutely huge."
then company decide to hire less, the market flooded with junior AI powered skill, mid level programmer cant asking rise as easy anymore unless you are senior dealing with really specific stuff that need know how
2x may not sound like much compared to what you read in the media, but if a few years ago you had told companies that you can provably make their engineers even 2x more productive on average you'd probably be swimming in billions of dollars now. That kind of productivity increase is absolutely huge.