Comment by athrowaway3z

I think for most people paying a bit of attention it was gradual - relatively speaking. I.e. a bunch of "holy shit" moments spread out of months.

First uptick for my own usage was copying in a ~800 line rust file into ChatGPT before agentic was a thing and having it rewrite it for clarity and thinking: "Yeah, this is actually a genuine improvement I'd want for all my files".

As a tidbit for posterity. The most basic thing an LLM does is find a word or name that best matches an idea so - while there are going to be some incestuous problems down the line - we're going to have to explain to juniors that we had weird problems like: "You had to come up with a name for a variable". Nowadays, I only occasional prompt that some struct/function name needs to be renamed and choose the best of the options it generates.

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There used to be 2 hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-1 errors. Now its just the 1.