Comment by imron

I'm pretty sure I have the right intellectual and emotional understanding of the AI and its abilities.

> I consider this to be partly what I mean by "LLM is a junior" and that "I act as the project manager".

And this is partly what I mean when I say the time I spend instructing the "junior" LLM could be just as well spent implementing the code myself - because the "project manager" side of me can work with the "senior dev" side of me at the speed of thought and often in parallel, and solving the challenges and the design of something is often where most of the time is spent anyway.

Skills are changing this equation somewhat due to the way they can encode repeatable knowledge, but not so much for me yet especially if I'm trying things out in radically different areas (I'm still in my experimental stage with them).

> Could you really have done a complex mobile app alone in one day without knowing the stack well beforehand?

No, but that's not what happened here.

The mobile app wasn't complex (literally only does the things outlined above) and I've done enough mobile development and graphics/computer vision development before that the stack and concepts involved weren't completely unknown, just the specifics of the various iOS APIs and how to string them together - hence why I initially thought it would be a good use case for AI.

It was also an incredible coincidence that the toy app I wanted to build had an apple developer tutorial that did almost the same thing as what I was looking to build, and so yes, I clearly would have been better off using the documentation as a starting point rather than the AI.

That sort of coincidence won't always exist, but I've thinking lately about another toy iOS/apple watch application, and I checked, and once again there is a developer tutorial that closely matches what I'm looking to build. If I ever get around to experimenting with that, the developer docs are going to be my first port of call rather than an AI.

> I certainly could not have done one year ago what I can do today, with these tools.

Right, and if you look back at my original reply (not to you), this is what I'm trying to understand - the what and how of AI productivity gains, because if I evaluate the output I get it's almost always either something I could have built faster and better, or if not faster then at least better and not so much slower that the AI was enabling a week of work to be done in a day, and month of work to be done in a week (claims from the GP, not you).

I would love to be able to realize those gains - and I can see the potential but just not the results.