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Comment by thangalin

2 days ago

Not the OP, but:

https://repo.autonoma.ca/notanexus.git

I don't know the PDF.js library. Writing both the client- and server-side for a PDF annotation editor would have taken 60 hours, maybe more. Instead, a combination Copilot, DeepSeek, Claude, and Gemini yielded a working prototype in under 6 hours:

https://repo.autonoma.ca/notanexus.git/tree/HEAD/src/js

I wrote maybe 3 lines of JavaScript, the rest was all prompted.

> Writing both the client- and server-side for a PDF annotation editor would have taken 60 hours, maybe more.

How do you know? Seems to me you’re making the exact same estimation mistake of the people in the study.

> Instead, a combination Copilot, DeepSeek, Claude, and Gemini yielded a working prototype in under 6 hours

Six hours for a prototype using four LLMs? That is not impressive, it sounds insane and a tremendous mess that will take so long to dig out of the prototype stage it’ll effectively require a rewrite.

And why are you comparing an LLM prototype to a finished product “by hand” (I surely hope you’re not suggesting such a prototype would take sixty hours)? That is disingenuous and skewing the numbers.