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What would you estimate as the industry-wide productivity increase for programmers from this tool? I've seen estimates anywhere from 1.5x to 10x from friends, w

What would you estimate as the industry-wide productivity increase for programmers from this tool? I've seen estimates anywhere from 1.5x to 10x from friends, which astounds me because in any other context whatsoever a 50% productivity increase is absolute gold, let alone the wild and frankly unbelievable higher numbers. Something I'm really interested in, after we've gotten the full 32k context and multi-modal capabilities of GPT-4 and done all the Langchain/ReAct shenaniganery we can, is GPT-5, or 6. These things are coming so fast and delivering step changes in productivity, it really does feel like something new.

roel_v 4y ago
Oh I don't know about that, I can only comment on my own experiences. I don't have sufficient breadth of experience to be able to say how much of this would be applicable to other developers in other subfields. I do however, like you, look forward to multi modal capabilities. I fully expect it to be able to take a Balsamiq mockup and generate the code to set up the UI for that mockup, with handlers for widget events and all. I've already had it generate UI's from text descriptions, which was cumbersome (relatively speaking - hedonistic adaptation strikes hard here). Wrt to productivity - I do think it's misleading to look at it like 'it used to take me 5 hours, now only 1, so that's 5x' or some other (imo naive) quantification. It's much more about removing drudgery and thus freeing up mental resources for interesting things. Say I do a task with a certain tool in the same time it took me without it, but in a much less mentally taxing way (because that's what drudgery does to me - activate bore-out mode). From the naive metric pov there is no productivity improvement. But if that leaves me capable of doing more in the rest of the day/week because I don't have to fight myself to move on with something, I'd argue it's still a productivity gain. Does typing with a nice keyboard and in a good chair make me more 'productive'? Well, I don't think anyone will argue that I can't type on a e5 Chinese crap one while sitting on a bucket before a door on two sawhorses. I can even type and think equally fast in those circumstances. But better tools still make one more 'productive' in the larger picture, I don't think anyone with experience will deny this either. This 'productivity gain' is in that sense somewhat ethereal, in a poetic sense of that word. To me that's where these tools are at now.
scld 4y ago
IMO the biggest unknown is the subset of people who will have near infinite increase in productivity because it opens a door that was completely closed to them previously. Otherwise incredibly talented people in art/manufacturing/education/etc. who have a lot of domain expertise could be the ones who really come up with the coolest new uses of the tech.
jacobr1 4y ago
One of the interesting things with with programming as field is that 2x-10x productivity gains are _common_. New abstractions and tools regularly allow people and teams to build more, quickly. The goalposts of what is expected to be delivered, and the complexity of systems expands to fill the time available to software development teams, but they are delivering more, especially if you step back and look at things on any given 10-20 year timespan. So Codex will provide big productivity boosts, but so do moving to C from assembly, or Ruby on Rails, or react vs jquery-spaghetti. Open-source and commercial APIs extend this further, especially when interacting with things like money or the physical world.

roel_v 4y ago

Oh I don't know about that, I can only comment on my own experiences. I don't have sufficient breadth of experience to be able to say how much of this would be applicable to other developers in other subfields. I do however, like you, look forward to multi modal capabilities. I fully expect it to be able to take a Balsamiq mockup and generate the code to set up the UI for that mockup, with handlers for widget events and all. I've already had it generate UI's from text descriptions, which was cumbersome (relatively speaking - hedonistic adaptation strikes hard here). Wrt to productivity - I do think it's misleading to look at it like 'it used to take me 5 hours, now only 1, so that's 5x' or some other (imo naive) quantification. It's much more about removing drudgery and thus freeing up mental resources for interesting things. Say I do a task with a certain tool in the same time it took me without it, but in a much less mentally taxing way (because that's what drudgery does to me - activate bore-out mode). From the naive metric pov there is no productivity improvement. But if that leaves me capable of doing more in the rest of the day/week because I don't have to fight myself to move on with something, I'd argue it's still a productivity gain. Does typing with a nice keyboard and in a good chair make me more 'productive'? Well, I don't think anyone will argue that I can't type on a e5 Chinese crap one while sitting on a bucket before a door on two sawhorses. I can even type and think equally fast in those circumstances. But better tools still make one more 'productive' in the larger picture, I don't think anyone with experience will deny this either. This 'productivity gain' is in that sense somewhat ethereal, in a poetic sense of that word. To me that's where these tools are at now.

scld 4y ago

IMO the biggest unknown is the subset of people who will have near infinite increase in productivity because it opens a door that was completely closed to them previously. Otherwise incredibly talented people in art/manufacturing/education/etc. who have a lot of domain expertise could be the ones who really come up with the coolest new uses of the tech.

jacobr1 4y ago

One of the interesting things with with programming as field is that 2x-10x productivity gains are _common_. New abstractions and tools regularly allow people and teams to build more, quickly. The goalposts of what is expected to be delivered, and the complexity of systems expands to fill the time available to software development teams, but they are delivering more, especially if you step back and look at things on any given 10-20 year timespan. So Codex will provide big productivity boosts, but so do moving to C from assembly, or Ruby on Rails, or react vs jquery-spaghetti. Open-source and commercial APIs extend this further, especially when interacting with things like money or the physical world.