Comment by simonw
1 day ago
I've written tens of thousands of lines of tested, working code that I would not have written otherwise, and that code is useful to me.
I effectively get to operate at the rate of a small team of engineers - I know that because I've managed small teams of engineers in the past.
> that I would not have written otherwise
I think this is the part I struggle with. The code I write makes me money or is a way of teaching me something, both of which are reasons that I would write the code regardless.
I don’t think I have any projects in mind that I’d be willing to spend half of a car on that I also wouldn’t have written myself.
Obviously just a personal take though. I’m glad you get the usage you want out of it.
My "job" is building open source software for data journalism (and anyone else who needs the tools data journalists need, which is pretty much everyone else). I can build more of those tools, and better, in exchange for a fraction of the cost it would take to hire a team to help.
I reached my own productivity limit on several projects (in my case, I'm building a fully automated microscope that uses realtime computer vision to solve a number of longstanding problems with microscopes). As much as I'd want to write the code for it, I hit a wall when it came to debugging some particularly tricky issues- either I couldn't do it, or the time investment was too high.
I use Gemini/ChatGPT/Claude to do that work and it unblocked the enjoyable parts of the project while taking care of the tedium.
I also find LLMs help me learn faster because they can often take a paper and turn it into working code, which I find to be a very slow process.