Comment by Draiken

Comment by Draiken 6 days ago

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I think that tracks with what I see: LLMs enable non-experts to do something really fast.

If I want to, let's say, create some code in a language I never worked on an LLM will definitely make me more "productive" by spewing out code for me way faster than I could write it. Same if I try to quickly learn about a topic I'm not familiar with. Especially if you don't care about the quality, maintainability, etc. too much.

But if I'm already a software developer with 15 years of experience dealing with technology I use every day, it's not going to increase my productivity in any meaningful way.

This is the dissonance I see with AI talk here. If you're not a software developer the things LLMs enable you to do are game-changers. But if you are a good software developer, in its best days it's a smarter autocomplete, a rubber-duck substitute (when you can't talk to a smart person) or a mildly faster google search that can be very inaccurate.

If you go from 0 to 1 that's literally infinitely better but if you go from 100 to 105, it's barely noticeable. Maybe everyone with these absurd productivity gains are all coming from zero or very little knowledge but for someone that's been past that point I can't believe these claims.