Comment by srhtftw
6 days ago
> It took me a few days to build the library with AI. ... > I estimate it would have taken a few weeks, maybe months to write by hand.
I don't think this is a fair assessment give the summary of the commit history https://pastebin.com/bG0j2ube shows your work started on 2025-02-27 and started trailing off at 2025-03-20 as others joined in. Minor changes continue to present.
> That said, this is a pretty ideal use case: implementing a well-known standard on a well-known platform with a clear API spec.
Still, this allowed you to complete in a month what may have taken two. That's a remarkable feat considering the time and value of someone of your caliber.
I think the data supports that there were about 5 distinct days when I did a large amount of work on this library, and a sprinkling of minor commits through the rest of the month. Glen's commits, while numerous, were also fairly minor, mostly logistical details around releases.
This library is not the only thing I was working on, nor even the main thing. As the lead engineer of Cloudflare Workers I have quite a few other things demanding my time.
> (...) your work started on 2025-02-27 and started trailing off at 2025-03-20 as others joined in. Minor changes continue to present.
Your analysis is far too superficial to extract anything meaningful. I know for a fact that I have small projects that took me only a couple of days to get done which have a commit history ranging a few months. Also, software is never done. There's always room to refactor, and LLMs turn that into trivial problems. Lastly, is your project still under development if your commits are README updates, linter runs, and renaming variables?
There is a reason why commit history is not used to track productivity.
Is it though?
Would someone of author's caliber even be working on trivial slog item like Oauth2 implementation, if not for the novel development approach he wanted to attempt here ?
For the kind of regular jobs a engineer typically is expected to do, would it give 100% productivity jump ?
Many tools make lesser developers more productive (to a point) but they fail to improve the productivity of talented professionals. Lots of "no/low" code things come to mind. But here's a tool that made kentonv 2x productive at a task that's clearly in his wheelhouse. It seems under the right conditions it can improve the productivity of developers at the opposite end of the spectrum.
What other tools could do that?
To answer your question explicitly, we do have existing tools that help on that end, but they are nerdy and not hyped by beginners.
Type systems, LSPs, tests, formatters, Rust’s borrow checker, logs and traces, source control are examples of things that make experts go faster. This space is hardly neglected (but could always be better).
It is really nice to see LLMs helping on all skill levels.