Comment by peteforde
7 hours ago
It's incredibly frustrating arguing these same points, over and over, every time that this comes up. You're asking people who are experienced developers absolutely chewing through checklists and peeking at HN while compiling/procrastinating/eating a sandwich/waiting for a prompt to finish to not just explain but quantify what is plainly obvious to those people, every day. You want us to bring paper receipts, like we have some incentive to lie to you.
From our perspective, the gains are so obvious that it really does feel like you must just be doing something fundamentally wrong not to see the same wins.
So when someone says "I can't make it do the magic that you're seeing" it makes me wonder why you don't have a long list of projects that you've never gotten around to because life gets in the way.
Because... if you don't have that list, to us that translates as painfully incurious. It's inconceivable that you don't have such a list because just being a geek in this moment should be enough that you constantly notice things that you'd like to try. If you don't have that, it's like when someone tells you that they don't have an inner monologue. You don't love them any less, but it's very hard not to look at them a bit differently.
> It's incredibly frustrating arguing these same points, over and over, every time that this comes up. You're asking people who are experienced developers absolutely chewing through checklists and peeking at HN while compiling/procrastinating/eating a sandwich/waiting for a prompt to finish to not just explain but quantify what is plainly obvious to those people, every day. You want us to bring paper receipts, like we have some incentive to lie to you.
This puts what I have been feeling in the recent months into words pretty concisely!
To me, it really is a force multiplier: https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/i-blew-through-24-million-token... (though letting it run unconstrained/unsupervised is a mess, I generally like to make Claude Code create a plan and iterate on it with Opus 4.6, then fire off a review, since getting the Max subscription I don't really need Cerebras or other providers, though I still appreciate them)
At the same time I've seen people get really bad results with AI, often on smaller models, or just expecting to give it vague instructions and get good results, with no automated linters or prebuild checks in place, or just copying snippets with no further context in some random chat session.
Who knows, maybe there's a learning curve and a certain mindset that you need to have to get a benefit from the technology, to where like 80% of developers will see marginal gains or even detriment, which will show up in most of the current studies. A bit like how for a while architecturally microservices and serverless were all the rage and most people did an absolutely shit job at implementing them, before (hopefully) enough collective wisdom was gained of HOW to use the technology and when.
Totally! Though I maintain that the only good aspect to microservices is that krazam video. You know the one.
I do get frustrated when I see people not using Plan steps, copy/pasting from web front-ends or expecting to one-shot their entire codebase from a single dense prompt. It's problematic because it's not immediately obvious whether someone is still arguing like it's late 2024, you know what I mean?
Also, speaking for myself I can't recommend that anyone use anything but Opus 4.5 right now. 4.6 has a larger context window, but it's crazy expensive when that context window gets actually used even while most agree that these models get dumber when they have a super-large context. 4.5 actually scores slightly better than 4.6 on agentic development, too! But using less powerful models is literally using tools that are much more likely to produce the sorts of results that skeptics think apply across the board.
>It's incredibly frustrating arguing these same points, over and over,
quite frankly there seems to be something incredibly frustrating in your life going on, but I'm not sure that the underlying cause of whatever is weighing on your mind at the moment is that I asked "how do you know that what you are feeling is actually true, in comparison to what studies show should be true?" (rephrased, as not reasonable to quote whole post)
>From our perspective, the gains are so obvious that it really does feel like you must just be doing something fundamentally wrong not to see the same wins.
From my perspective, when I think i am experiencing something that data from multiple sources tell me is not what is actually happening I try to figure out how I can prove what I am experiencing, I reflect upon myself, have I somehow deluded myself? No? Then how do I prove it when analysis of many similar situations to my own show a different result?
You seem to think what I mean is people saying "Claude didn't help me, it wasn't worth it", no, just to clarify although I thought it was really clear, I am talking about numerous studies always being posted on HN so I'm sure you must have seen them where productivity gains from coding agents do not seem to actually show up in the work of those who use it. Studies conducted by third parties observing the work, not claims made by people performing the work.
I'm not going to go through the rest of your post, I get the urge to be insulting, especially as a stress release if you have a particularly bad time recently. But frankly, statistically speaking, my life is almost certainly significantly worse than yours, and for that reason, but not that reason alone, I will also quite confidently state without hardly any knowledge of you specifically but just my knowledge of my life and comparison of having met people throughout it, that my list dwarfs yours.
This takes the cake for one of the strangest replies I've ever received on here.
I'm not sure how or indeed why you draw lines from what I said to my life situation... which is relevant how?
What I apparently did not do a good enough job of conveying is that those "data from multiple sources" get cited and then people immediately reply with "those are old studies". It's circular in the same way that arguing with anti-vax people is circular.
The difference is that unlike vaccines, it's very easy for someone to see how productive they are when using LLMs properly. It's not a subtle difference.
Hence the frustration with people who keep insisting that we're imagining our own productivity. It's not a good faith inquiry.