This is excellent, and matches my experience.
Those lamenting the loss of manual programming: we are free to hone our skills on personal projects, but for corporate/consulting work, you cannot ignore 5x speed advantage. It's over. AI-assisted coding won.
It is 5x if you are already a senior SE knowing your programming language really well, constantly suggesting good architecture yourself ("seed files" is a brilliant idea), and not accepting any slop / asking to rewrite things if something is not up to your standards (of course, every piece of code should be reviewed).
Otherwise, it can be 0.2x in some cases. And you should not use LLMs for anything security-related unless you are a security expert, otherwise you are screwed.
(this is SOTA as of April 2025, I expect things to become better in the near future)
> It is 5x if you are already a senior SE knowing your programming language really well, constantly suggesting good architecture yourself ("seed files" is a brilliant idea), and not accepting any slop / asking to rewrite things if something is not up to your standards (of course, every piece of code should be reviewed).
If you know the programming language really well, that usually means you know what libraries are useful, memorized common patterns, and have some project samples laying out. The actual speed improvement would be on typing the code, but it's usually the activity that requires the least time on any successful project. And unless you're a slow typist, I can't see 5x there.
If you're lacking in fundamental, then it's just a skill issue, and I'd be suspicious of the result.
"Given this code, extract all entities and create the database schema from these", "write documentation for these methods", "write test examples", "write README.md explaining how to use scripts in this directory", "refactor everything in this directory just like this example", etc etc
Everything boring can be automated and it takes five seconds compared to half an hour.
Is it really 5x? I'm more surprised about 25+ years of experience, and being hard pressed to learn enough python to code the project. It's not like he's learning programming again, or being recently exposed to OOP. Especially when you can find working code samples about the subproblems in the project.