Comment by n_ary
2 days ago
> I use Claude and Chatgpt EVERY DAY […] What other innovation in the last decade has been this disruptive?
I use some sort of IDE everyday. Previously at my early days, I was a “true-hacker” and using Vim in console to type out massive code bases, we had waterfall development practices, I would fumble through source codes of various poorly documented features of the language or libraries for hours to figure out about needed function/method/attribute and how anything really worked and the quirks of strange error messages needing to call up the vendor or buy a book on the topic and hope it had answers… and of course, I practiced typing every weekend to speed up my typing speed.
Now, I just type something and the IDE reads my mind and shows appropriate suggestions and also helpfully imports the packages for me while also constantly formatting my codebase on save and raising red/yellow squigglies to suggest my mistakes. I copy paste any quirky errors in a search engine and immediately find other human beings reporting the problem and solutions, I can happily continue developing on the same codebase and parallel features while other teams can continue with their features and we’ll know soon if we have stepped on each others’ toes shortly in CI pipeline. What took me weeks now takes like few hours and if someone told me to do the same in Vim, I’d be blankly looking at them because that is arcane. Of course my IDE misguesses sometimes and I can correct it, but I am insanely productive now compared to decades back. What other innovation has made this kind of gains?
Also I could take a horse and go to a duty travel in another continent for a several month or even year journey, but now I can take a flight and be there in hour and I am saving insane amount of time.
The examples can go on, we have new novelties which are ground breaking, but AI is too much hype, and it is not well deserved. All the hype comes because the VC money burning on it and needs the prep the market for massive return. Too much of hype can turn sour if that topic had been seen to rise and die a fee times, hence it is natural that a lot of HN audience do not feel great to look at this anymore.
Last decade... GP said last decade. IDEs and airplanes are older.
> The examples can go on
Since the examples never started not sure how they could go on.
Counterpoint: I programmed exclusively in vim for a decade, switched to intellij for scala, did find it more productive (although I found intellij annoyingly sluggish relative to vim -- especially at startup), but then realized that scala itself was limiting my productivity even with the help of an IDE. I abandoned scala, went back to vim and wrote my own language in the most minimal way possible. I don't even use simple tab completions. Yet I am more productive in my language than in any other that I've previously used with or without an IDE.
I don't doubt that you are more productive with an IDE than without, but I personally think the magnitude is reflective of poor language and system design rather than the magic of IDEs (which I believe is relatively minor compared to using a fast compiler with good error reporting). In fact, I sort of think IDEs lead to a kind of trap where people design systems that require their use to be effective which then makes it seem as though the features of the IDE are essential rather than perhaps a source of complexity that is actually making the system worse.
I also will say that your horse vs flight example raises something for me. It's a bit like saying I could drive the Camino de Santiago in a day which saves me an insane amount of time. Sure, it's true, but it misses the entire point of the journey. I basically think the vast majority of programming efficiency boosting tools (ides and llms alike) are mainly just taking us faster on a road to nowhere. I live in San Francisco, supposedly the mecca of technology, and almost never encounter anyone working on anything of truly significant value (according to my personal value system). But I do find a lot of people slinging code for cash, which is a fine and understandable choice, but deeply uninspiring to me. Which also reflects how I feel about LLMs and the like.