This kind of take I find genuinely baffling. I can't see how anybody working with current frontier models isn't finding them a massive performance boost. No they can't replace a competent developer yet, but they can easily at least double your productivity.
Careful code review and a good pull request flow are important, just as they were before LLMs.
People thought they were doubling their productivity and then real, actual studies showed they were actually slower. These types of claims have to be taken with entire quarries of salt at this point.
I would also take those studies with a grain of salt at this point, or at least taking into consideration that a model from even a few months ago might have significant enough results from the current frontier models.
And in my personal experience it definitely helps in some tasks, and as someone who doesn't actually enjoy the actual coding part that much, it also adds some joy to the job.
Recently I've also been using it to write design docs, which is another aspect of the job that I somewhat dreaded.
Churning out 2x as much code is not doubling productivity. Can you perform at the same level as a dev who is considered 2x as productive as you? That's the real metric. Comparing quality to quantity of code ratios, bugs caused by your PRs, actual understanding of the code in your PR, ability to think slow, ability to deal with fires, ability to quickly deal with breaking changes accidentally caused by your changes.
Churning out more more per day is not the goal. No point merging code that either doesn't fully work, is not properly tested, other humans (or you) cannot understand, etc.
Why is that the real metric? If you can turn a 1x dev into a 2x dev that's a huge deal, especially if you can also turn the original 2x dev into a 4x dev.
And far from "churning out code" my work is better with LLMs. Better tested, better documented, and better organized because now I can do refactors that just would have taken too much time before. And more performant too because I can explore more optimization paths than I had time to before.
Refusing to use LLMs now is like refusing to use compilers 20 years ago. It might be justified in some specific cases but it's a bad default stance.
Seriously, I’m lucky if 10% of what I do in a week is writing code. I’m doubly lucky if, when I do, it doesn’t involve touching awful corporate horse-shit like low-code products that are allergic to LLM aid, plus multiple git repos, plus having knowledge from a bunch of “cloud” dashboard and SaaS product configs. By the time I prompt all that external crap in I could have just written what I wanted to write.
59nadir|1 month ago
cageface|1 month ago
I guess I should be happy that so many of my colleagues are willing to remove themselves from the competitive job pool with these kinds of attitudes.
mupuff1234|1 month ago
And in my personal experience it definitely helps in some tasks, and as someone who doesn't actually enjoy the actual coding part that much, it also adds some joy to the job.
Recently I've also been using it to write design docs, which is another aspect of the job that I somewhat dreaded.
netdevphoenix|1 month ago
Churning out 2x as much code is not doubling productivity. Can you perform at the same level as a dev who is considered 2x as productive as you? That's the real metric. Comparing quality to quantity of code ratios, bugs caused by your PRs, actual understanding of the code in your PR, ability to think slow, ability to deal with fires, ability to quickly deal with breaking changes accidentally caused by your changes.
Churning out more more per day is not the goal. No point merging code that either doesn't fully work, is not properly tested, other humans (or you) cannot understand, etc.
cageface|1 month ago
And far from "churning out code" my work is better with LLMs. Better tested, better documented, and better organized because now I can do refactors that just would have taken too much time before. And more performant too because I can explore more optimization paths than I had time to before.
Refusing to use LLMs now is like refusing to use compilers 20 years ago. It might be justified in some specific cases but it's a bad default stance.
phantasmish|1 month ago
Writing code is the easy and fast part already.