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Comment by qingcharles

14 hours ago

Practically every post on HN that mentions AI now ends up with a thread that is "I get 100X speed-up using LLMs" vs. "It made me slower and I've never met a single person in real life who has worked faster with AI."

I'm a half-decent developer with 40 years experience. AI regularly gives me somewhere in the range of 10-100X speed-up of development. I don't benefit from a meme, I do benefit from better code delivered faster.

Sometimes AI is a piece of crap and I work at 0.5X for an hour flogging a dead horse. But those are rarer these days.

I've posted this on another comment verbatim that was similar to yours, so apologies for the copy and paste:

Can you share what exactly this was (that got you the 10-100x speedup)? Perhaps I don't do anything exciting or challenging, but personally this hasn't happened to me so I find it hard to imagine what this could be.

Instead of AI companies talking about their products, I think the thing to really sell it for me would be an 8 hour long video of an extremely proficient programmer using AI to build something that would have taken them a very long time if they were unassisted.

  • I would love to make these videos for you if you want to pay for my time. Drop me an email at josh.d.griffith at gmail and tell me what you want to see and compensate. I can vibe code at any scale.

    • I assume this is a reply in jest :)

      > I can vibe code at any scale.

      That's the thing - I know what 'vibe coding' is because that's pretty much how I use AI, as an exploratory tool or interactive documentation or a search engine for topics I want surface level information about.

      It does not make me a 10x-100x more efficient. It's a toy and a learning tool. It could be replaced or removed and I wouldn't miss it that much.

      Clearly I am missing something. I care about quality software, so if it's making someone 100x more productive but their producing the same subpar nonsense they would anyway then I am not interested. Hence I want to see a really proficient programmer use it, be 10x+ more productive, and have a quality product at the end. That's what I want to see demonstrated.