Comment by deadbabe
6 days ago
The thing about people making claims like “An LLM did something for me in an hour that would take me days” is that people conveniently leave out what their own skill level is.
I’ve definitely seen humans do stuff in an hour that takes others days to do. In fact, I see it all the time. And sometimes, I know people who have skills to do stuff very quickly but they choose not to because they’d rather procrastinate and not get pressured to pick up even more work.
And some people waste even more time writing stuff from scratch when libraries exist for whatever they’re trying to do, which could get them up and running quickly.
So really I don’t think these bold claims of LLMs being so much faster than humans hit as hard as some people think they do.
And here’s the thing: unless you’re using the time you save to fill yourself up with even more work, you’re not really making productivity gains, you’re just using an LLM to acquire more free time on the company dime.
Again, implicit in this comment is the belief that I am out to or need to convince you of something. You would be the only person who would benefit from that. I don’t gain anything from it. All I get out of this is having insulting comments about my “skill level” posted by someone who knows nothing about me.
You don’t know the harm you’re inflicting. Some manager will read your comment and conclude that anyone who isn’t reducing tasks that previously took hours or days into a brief 1 hour LLM session is underperforming.
In reality, there is a limit to how quickly tasks can be done. Around here, the size of PRs usually have changes that most people could just type out in under 30 minutes if they knew exactly what to type. However, getting to the point where you know exactly what you need to type takes days or even weeks, often collaborating across many teams and thinking deep about potential long term impacts down the road, and balancing company ROI and roadmap objectives, perhaps even running experiments.
You cannot just throw LLMs at those problems and have them wrapped up in an hour. If that’s what you’re doing, you’re not working on big problems, you’re doing basic refactors and small features that don’t require high level skills, where the bottleneck is mostly how fast you can type.
>And some people waste even more time writing stuff from scratch when libraries exist for whatever they’re trying to do
That's an argument for LLMs.
>you’re just using an LLM to acquire more free time on the company dime.
This is a bad thing?
> you’re just using an LLM to acquire more free time on the company dime
You might as well do that since any productivity gains will go to your employer, not you.
That's not how FAANG compensation works.
FAANG engineers are still working class.
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