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Comment by ang_cire

2 months ago

If you create a sufficiently absurd hypothetical, anything is possible.

Or are you calling an LLM a "clone" of you? In that case, it's more, "if you create a flawed enough starting premise, anything is possible".

> flawed enough starting premise

That's where we start to disagree what future looks like, then.

It's not there yet, in that the LLM-clone isn't good enough. But amusingly a not nearly good enough clone of me already made me more productive, in that I'm able to deliver more while maintaining the same level of personal satisfaction with my code.

  • The question of increasing productivity and what that means for us as laborers is another entire can of worms, but that aside, I have never yet found LLM-gen'd code that met my personal standards, and sped up my total code output.

    If I want to spend my time refactoring and bugfixing and rewriting and integrating, rather than writing from scratch and bugfixing, I can definitely achieve that by using LLM code, but the overall time has never felt different to me, and in many cases I've thrown out the LLM code after several hours due to either sheer frustration with how it's written, or due to discovering that the structure it's using doesn't work with the rest of the program (see: anything related to threading).

    • This has been my experience as well, and really leaves me puzzled as to what anyone is gushing about.

      Can I just about corral the LLM into producing working output? Yea, sometimes. From a technology perspective, that’s pretty cool!

      But is it a productivity boost? Absolutely not. Like not even close. Every time it would have been faster for me to just write the code myself.

      I really don’t know how to square the vast gulf between my experiences and many other peoples’.