Comment by bitwize
6 days ago
It depends on the task. There are certain tasks which are too tedious, time-consuming, and error-prone to be valuable for humans to perform, and couldn't be automated effectively until LLMs came along. Eric Raymond has cited a shortening of some tasks from weeks to hours. Andreas Kling managed to lift the JS runtime for his browser Ladybird to Rust from C++ in a couple of weeks, some 25,000 lines of code.
The productivity gains are real, and in some cases they are enormous. It is actively, profoundly stupid to pass on them. You need to learn how to work with AI.
Oh for sure, there are _many_ things we defer or value too much for the time they'd have taken otherwise.
But my point is, those are, by definition, lower value. Check back in a big company how much their revenue growth is (which is ultimately the only metric that's hard to game), then the situation changes.
Otherwise, im sure diff per person per day went up 10x. Output in the sense I am talking about is different.