Comment by pron

I'm only an "AI sceptic" in the sense that I think that today's LLM models cannot regularly and substantially reduce my workload, not because they aren't able to perform interesting programming tasks (they are!), but because they don't do so reliably, and for a regular and substantial reduction in effort, I think a tool needs to be reliable and therefore trustworthy.

Now, this story is a perfect use case, because Filippo Valsorda put very little effort into communicating with the agent. If it worked - great; if it didn't - no harm done. And it worked!

The thing is that I already know that these tools are capable of truly amazing feats, and this is, no doubt, one of them. But it's been a while since I had a bug in a single-file library implementing a well-known algorithm, so it still doesn't amount to a regular and substantial increase in productivity for me, but "only" to yet another amazing feat by LLMs (something I'm not sceptical of).

Next time I have such a situation, I'll definitely use an LLM to debug it, because I enjoy seeing such results first-hand (plus, it would be real help). But I'm not sure that it supports the claim that these tools can today offer a regular and substantial productivity boost.