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Comment by conartist6

1 year ago

I think of this story every time I see a statistic about how much LLMs have "increased the productivity" of a developer

Or the current industry favourite, “X% of our new code is now written by AI!”

  • Microsoft, the number being 30%; whether that's accurate is another matter. Twenty years ago people already used IDEs to generate boilerplate code (remember Java's getters/setters/hashCode/toString?) because some guy in a book said you had to.

  • I use AI to simplify code. My manifesto has always been code is debt. Works really well too.

  • In Google's case, outside of LLMs I've always wondered how much code was generated by the protocol buffer compiler.

  • LOL. There was a time when people were excoriated for committing generated object code into version control..

Including the cost to build and maintain new nuclear power plants takes developers' efficiency into absurdity.