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Comment by roncesvalles

5 hours ago

I think AI is completely optional for software development.

There seems to be a new kind of anxiety wherein devs feel that they aren't leveraging AI to the fullest in order to make them more productive at developing software, and that since they aren't doing so, they should just give up writing software completely.

This anxiety is unfounded. The difference between using AI vs not using AI is not like using a physical spreadsheet vs Microsoft Excel. It's more like using a text editor versus an IDE. If you're happy producing software the way that you always were sans AI, you should just keep doing it that way and don't even pay mind to AI tooling.

Those guys who have super sophisticated MCP/tool use setups, and a roster of agents, and testdrive all the latest tools and plugins, and curate a personal library of carefully tuned prompts that make them the "LLM Whisperer" — they're not actually doing that much better than you at producing software. Or at least not to the extent that you are totally obsolete.

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roncesvalles

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askafriend  5 hours ago

I think it’s exactly like going from paper spreadsheet to Excel in some very important aspects of engineering (but not all).

I really encourage you to update your priors since capabilities are very different than even 6 months ago.

  • roncesvalles  5 hours ago

    I like to think I'm very much abreast of the bleeding edge because I feel this anxiety myself. At this point I can't code without LLMs because I just notice things that I could hand off to LLMs and they will do it faster and there's no reason for me to do it myself (although I still could).

    But the overall gain in efficiency is still a low single digit speedup. It's not a multi-OOM speedup as if e.g. doing 1000 long divisions by hand over many days versus letting a computer program do them in a split second. The "wall" that is irreducible complexity was never OOMs away from how modern pre-AI software development was done.

    • Kerrick  4 hours ago

      For me the speed-up has not been in doing things I was already an expert at doing quickly with high quality. It has been in skipping the learning curve for adjacent things.

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