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Comment by DiogenesKynikos

19 days ago

My own coding productivity has increased by a few times by using LLMs. Is that just a bubble?

Your productivity has not increased by a few times unless you're measuring purely by lines of code written, which has been firmly established over the decades as a largely meaningless metric.

  • I needed to track the growth of "tx_ucast_packets" in each queue on a network interface earlier.

    I asked my friendly LLM to run every second and dump the delta for each queue into a csv, 10 seconds to write what I wanted, 5 seconds later to run it, then another 10 seconds to reformat it after looking at the output.

    It had hardcoded the interface, which is what I told it to do, but I'm happy with it and want to change the interface, so again 5 seconds of typing and it's using argparse to take in a bunch of variables.

    That task would have taken me far longer than 30 seconds to do 5 years ago.

    Now if only AI can reproduce the intermittent problem with packet ordering I've been chasing down today.

  • I'm measuring by the amount of time it takes me to write a piece of code that does something I want, like make a plot or calculate some quantity of interest.

    Or even the fact that I was able to start coding in an entirely new ML framework right away without reading any documentation beforehand.

    I'm puzzled by the denialism about AI-driven productivity gains in coding. They're blindingly obvious to anyone using AI to code nowadays.