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Comment by roncesvalles

6 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.

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.

    • Will you remember it if you don't "break your teeth" on it though? At the same level as the things you're already an expert on?