Comment by ryandrake
6 days ago
I hate how the discourse around LLM-assisted programing is so polarized. It's either detractors saying it's "a fad that's useless and going nowhere, wasting billions of megawatts every year" or it's true believers calling it "the most miraculous sea change technological advancement in my lifetime" or "more important than fire and electricity[1]." There just doesn't seem to be any room in the middle.
I tried out Copilot a few months back to see what all the fuss was about and so that I could credibly engage with discussions having actually used the technology. I'd rate it as "kind of neat-o" but not earth shattering. It was like the first time I used an IDE with auto-complete. Oh, cool, nice feature. Would I pay monthly for it? No way. Would I integrate it into my development workflow if it were free? Maybe, I guess? Probably wouldn't bother unless it came literally set up for me out of the box like autocomplete does nowadays.
Don't get me wrong--it's cool technology. Well done, AI people. Is it "the 2nd most important thing to happen over the course of my career" as OP wrote? Come on, let's come down to earth a little.
1: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/01/google-ceo-sundar-pichai-ai-...
I don't know. I think 9-12 months ago I'd agree with you. But I feel like the last 6 months my productivity has vastly improved. Not only that, it's also brought back a little bit of passion for the field.
It's easy to come up with some good ideas for new project, but then not want to do a lot of the garbage work related to the project. I offload all that shit to the LLM now.
Seriously, the LLMs have increased my productivity 2-4x.
Copilot is a bad yardstick. The article literally addresses exactly this. It’s not just “cool technology”, that’s the point. It enables things that were previously impossible.
I spent $600 on claude via cursor last month and it was easily worth 2-3x that.
Since the "state of the art" seems to change every week, what's a good way to try out the current "state of the art", without spending $600? I'd love to give it a shot and be proven wrong, but I'm not going to spend 1/2 a mortgage payment on a trial.
EDIT: Looks like the "Cursor" thing has a free trial. Might start there.
I spent $600 because I did something like 5200 uses.
You can start off for much less. I recommend trying claude-4-opus max/thinking. There might be cheaper options but that’s the one that has given me the best results so far.