Comment by surgical_fire
6 days ago
A year+ ago, LLMs worked nearly as good as they work today.
I say this as someone that uses LLMs on a daily basis. It is a moderately useful tool for software development, but it was already useful in January 2025 (to pick a random date). Check what models were available by then. There were improvements since them, but they were mostly marginal.
The thing is, ever since ChatGPT 4 days there are people claiming on a daily basis exactly what you are claiming now, and it feels pretty silly. Sometimes it's hard to not imagine the accounts breathlessly claiming 100x productivity as bots.
In other words, I presume that if you are 100x more productive now, you were a 1/100x developer before LLMs. I actually question the capabilities of anyone making claims like that.
The "100x productive" thing is some kind of bogeyman. It's pretty clear these things are useful and helpful and the degree to which they are such continually improves, but putting some specific large number on it is pointless.
If you didn't notice a difference between AI assisted coding in Jan 2025 and now beyond "marginal" improvements... well to be frank I don't think you've really been paying very close attention. It's a combination of the way we interact with the models and the models themselves, and this really did get much more effective in late 2025.
You can say the model improvements in that year were incremental, but the degree to which the overall capabilities have changed and what that means for software development is more than the sum of those parts.
> The "100x productive" thing is some kind of bogeyman.
> If you didn't notice a difference between AI assisted coding in Jan 2025 and now beyond "marginal" improvements... well to be frank I don't think you've really been paying very close attention.
Those are the same claims, just phrased differently. If the first is a bogeyman, so is the second.
And of course, if someone disagrees that the improvements since 2025 were not dramatic, they can only possibly not be paying attention. Except we have been seeing the same claims on a daily basis for years.