[jmogly]

I would say it varies from 0x to a modest 2x. It can help you write good code quickly, but, I only spent about 20-30% of my time writing code anyway before AI. It definitely makes debugging and research tasks much easier as well. I would confidently say my job as a senior dev has gotten a lot easier and less stressful as a result of these tools.

One other thing I have seen however is the 0x case, where you have given too much control to the llm, it codes both you and itself into pan’s labyrinth, and you end up having to take a weed wacker to the whole project or start from scratch.

[mattmanser]

Ok, if you're a senior dev, have you 'caught' it yet?

Ask it a question about something you know well, and it'll give you garbage code that it's obviously copied from an answer on SO from 10 years ago.

When you ask it for research, it's still giving you garbage out of date information it copied from SO 10 years ago, you just don't know it's garbage.

[theshrike79]

That's why you dont use LLMs as a knowledge source without giving them tools.

"Agents use tools in a loop to achieve a goal."

If you don't give any tools, you get hallucinations and half-truths.

But you give one a tool to do, say, web searches and it's going to be a lot smarter. That's where 90% of the innovation with "AI" today is coming from. The raw models aren't gettin that much smarter anymore, but the scaffolding and frameworks around them are.

Tools are the main reason Claude Code is as good as it is compared to the competition.

[jmogly]

Of course, step one is always critically think and evaluate for bad information. I think for research, I mainly use it for things that are testable/verifiable, for example I used it for a tricky proxy chain set up. I did try to use it to learn a language a few months ago which I think was counter productive for the reasons you mentioned.

[skydhash]

I use web search (DDG) and I don’t think I have ever try more than one queries in the vast majority of cases. Why because I know where the answer is, I’m using the search engine as an index to where I can find it. Like “csv python” to find that page in the doc.