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I think it’s exactly like going from paper spreadsheet to Excel in some very important aspects of engineering (but not all).

I really encourage you to update your priors since capabilities are very different than even 6 months ago.

roncesvalles
I like to think I'm very much abreast of the bleeding edge because I feel this anxiety myself. At this point I can't code without LLMs because I just notice things that I could hand off to LLMs and they will do it faster and there's no reason for me to do it myself (although I still could).

But the overall gain in efficiency is still a low single digit speedup. It's not a multi-OOM speedup as if e.g. doing 1000 long divisions by hand over many days versus letting a computer program do them in a split second. The "wall" that is irreducible complexity was never OOMs away from how modern pre-AI software development was done.

Kerrick
For me the speed-up has not been in doing things I was already an expert at doing quickly with high quality. It has been in skipping the learning curve for adjacent things.
roncesvalles
Does it make the curve easier or do you skip learning it entirely and just trust the LLM? I wouldn't do the latter.
Kerrick
So far I've skipped learning it entirely. For things I want to learn, I learn the old school way--maybe with an LLM as an unreliable thesaurus and/or second search engine (where I distrust its output, but read its links). For things I want to just get done, I use an LLM. It's something close to blind trust, but not completely.

For example, I've used LLMs to write ~1600 lines of Rust in the past few days. I'm having it make Ratatui bindings for Ruby. I haven't ever learned Rust, but I can read C-like languages so I kinda understand what's happening. I could tell when it needed to be modularized. I have a sneaking suspicion most of the Rust tests it's written are testing Ratatui, rather than testing its own bindings. But I've had the LLM cover the functionality in Ruby tests, a language I do know. So I've felt comfortable enough to ship it.

nottorp
Will you remember it if you don't "break your teeth" on it though? At the same level as the things you're already an expert on?
Kerrick
I'm a big believer in desirable difficulty for learning. But I'm a big believer in reduced difficulty for non-learning-oriented getting-things-done.
yeasku
The 6 months ago is a meme at this point.
rityvkjivfgj (dead)

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