I saw a tweet from Andrej Karpathy that's been sitting with me. He's never felt this behind as a programmer. I've been thinking about this through the marshmallow challenge, where kindergartners beat MBAs. The kids just build and iterate. Most of us are the MBAs right now with AI tools.
Some of it is that the radical acceleration in productivity isn't real. See Brook's "No Silver Bullet". You certainly have those moments where you describe a bug and ask if it can understand it and get an answer in two minutes, but when you consider everything that goes into the "definition of done", 10x just isn't realistic.
My take at work is that I'm not running much faster, but I am getting better quality. Some of it is my attitude, but with AI I am more likely to go back and forth and ask things until I really understand what is going on, write tests even when it is a hassle to write tests, ask the IDE questions about the dependencies I use so I can really understand how they work, try two or three possible solutions and pick the best, etc.
When it comes to things like that memory leak it is very hit and miss. If you give it try it might solve it, it might not. It's worth trying. But you can't count on something like that working all the time.
sak84|2 months ago
PaulHoule|2 months ago
My take at work is that I'm not running much faster, but I am getting better quality. Some of it is my attitude, but with AI I am more likely to go back and forth and ask things until I really understand what is going on, write tests even when it is a hassle to write tests, ask the IDE questions about the dependencies I use so I can really understand how they work, try two or three possible solutions and pick the best, etc.
When it comes to things like that memory leak it is very hit and miss. If you give it try it might solve it, it might not. It's worth trying. But you can't count on something like that working all the time.