Comment by timschmidt

> It won't learn or grow from the corrections I make in that PR, so why bother?

That does not match my experience. As the codebases I've worked with LLMs on become more opinionated and stylized, it seems to to a better job of following the existing work. And over time the models have absolutely improved in terms of their ability to understand issues and offer solutions. Each new release has solved problems for me that the previous ones have struggled with.

Re: interpersonal interactions, I don't find that the LLM has pushed them out or away. My projects still have groups of interested folk who talk and joke and learn and have fun. What the LLMs have addressed for me in part is the relative scarcity of labor for such work. I'm not hacking on the Linux Kernel with 10,000 contributors. Even with a dozen contributors, the amount of contributed code is relatively low and only in areas they are interested in. The LLM doesn't mind if I ask it to do something super boring. And it's been surprisingly helpful in chasing down bugs.

> Maybe one day it'll reach perfect parity of what I could've written myself, but today isn't that day.

Regardless of whether or not that happens, they've already been useful for me for at least 9 months. Since O3, which is the first one that really started to understand Rust's borrow checker in my experience. My measure isn't whether or not it writes code as well as I do, but how productive I am when working with it compared to not. In my measurements with SLOCCount over the last 9 months, I'm about 8x more productive than the previous 15 years without (as long as I've been measuring). And that's allowed me to get to projects which have been on the shelf for years.

This article by an AI researcher I happen to have worked with neatly sums up feelings I've had about comments like yours: https://medium.com/@ahintze_23208/ai-or-you-who-is-the-one-w...