Comment by askafriend
7 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.
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.
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.
Does it make the curve easier or do you skip learning it entirely and just trust the LLM? I wouldn't do the latter.
1 reply →
The 6 months ago is a meme at this point.