[beagle3]

For most non-hobby project, the cost of code was in breaking a working system (whether by a bona fide bug, or a change in some unspecified implicit assumption). That made changes to code incredibly expensive - often much more than the original implementation.

It sounds harsh, but over the lifetime of a project, 10-lines/person/day is often a high estimate of the number of lines produced. It’s not because humans type so slow - it is because after a while, it’s all about changing previously written lines in ways that don’t break things.

LLMs are much better at that than humans, if the constraints and tests are reasonably well specified.

[LtWorf]

> if the constraints and tests are reasonably well specified.

if they are, then why would a human be so slow? You're not comparing the same situation.

[theshrike79]

Because humans need to type with a keyboard, then click around with a mouse.

In that time the LLM has made a change, ran tests, committed, pushed, checked that the CI build failed, looked at the CI logs, fixed the issue and the PR is now passing.

[gbalduzzi]

The human in that case is not "so slow", but at the current state it is slower than an LLM as simple as that.

The difference comes in confidence that the solution works and can be maintained in the future, but in terms of purely making the decisions and applying the changes an LLM is faster when it has all the required infos available