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I still haven't figured out how people use this that much. I use LLMs almost daily via ChatGPT, Phind, Kagi Ultimate (my current one), etc. However i spend too

I still haven't figured out how people use this that much. I use LLMs almost daily via ChatGPT, Phind, Kagi Ultimate (my current one), etc. However i spend too much time pushing the LLM towards my goal that i can't imagine it speeding my coding up. I clearly find value in LLMs to some degree, but speeding up my coding is not yet one.. i'd love to, but i just don't understand. I can only imagine typing more in explanation for the LLM than it would take me to write it to begin with.

oblio 3y ago
IMO a chunk of it is like Peel developers: people that prioritize their own speed above all else: readability, team reviews, etc. I'd love to be proven wrong.
010101010101 3y ago
I rarely find interfacing with an external chat interface useful, but integration with the coding environment (e.g. Copilot) is an immediate productivity boost.
swatcoder 3y ago
Some revered novelists spend all day to write a single page and others are able to get in a flow and produce a chapter in that same time. Without getting into touchy questions of quality and talent and the whole 10x trope, there are a lot of working engineers out there that produce code a lot more slowly than others and that work on more common problems than others. My sense is copilot-like products provide the biggest boon to those people and are a lot harder for people who are more naturally prolific or who work on more esoteric things.
- holoduke 3y ago
  Have you ever tried it?. It sounds like you are a bit against the idea of an AI supporting your work.
freedomben 3y ago
It all seems to depend on what you are doing. The more niche and technical the task, the less the AI can help. If you are just generating crud and points for a common web language and framework, it can be an 80% boost. I think the real problem with this is that people aren't differentiating these different types of work when they give these numbers.
- ickyforce 3y ago
  It's not just the type of work but also experience. Here are two cases: 1. After working for many years in Java I needed to build a service. I spent few days designing it and then a month on implementation. I used DBs and libraries I knew very well. I didn't need to access google/stackoverflow, I didn't need to look up names of (std)lib methods and their parameters and if something wasn't working it was fairly obvious what I needed to change. 2. Recently I wanted to create a simple page which fetched a bunch of stuff from some URLs and showed the results, simple stuff. But with React since that was what frontend team was using. I never used React and rarely touched web in the recent years. Most of my time was spent googling about React and how exactly CORS/SOP work in the browsers, and with polishing it took a couple of days. I'm pretty sure that in case 1) AI wouldn't help me much. Maybe just as a more fancy code completion. In case 2) AI would probably be a significant time save. I could just ask it to write some draft for me and then I could make few tweaks, without having to figure out React. But somehow nobody quantifies their experience with the languages/tools when they are using AI - I'm sure there's a staggering difference between 1 month and 10 yoe.
azeirah 3y ago
For myself I have several distinct cognitive weaknesses that I can often just unload onto an AI in a conversational style. For instance I know I'm good at breaking up large tasks into smaller ones, but because planning and executive functioning is by far my worst energy consuming skill (adhd) I can save a lot of energy (but not time) by approaching it conversationally. I'd often use colleagues for the same thing, but then my productivity costs 2 salaries Similarly, I have some trouble with memory and cognitive speed when I'm tired which is unfortunately often the case due to my health, I know well enough what I kinda "want" to do and I let the AI generate something that comes near what I need and I can work from there once I have the right starting point. Just my personal experience I'd wanted to share.
holoduke 3y ago
Its usually with simple things like code completion on logging, boiler plate, repetitive tasks etc. I am surprised sometimes how copilot knows what my next step is. I am typing in the start of an algorithm and copilot gives me the rest. And it predicts a lot of things correctly. It saves me tons of time. Another thing what i like is that I no longer need to no all the programming language related syntax. In the past I looked up stuff on stackoverflow. Now i simply type a short comment like "reverse the array...". Copilot automatically suggests the right syntaxes. Sometimes need some adjustments, but thats fine.
block_dagger 3y ago
Try this: in a situation where you need a small change to an existing class that you haven't looked at in a long time, dump the code and spec to ChatGPT with a request to add the feature or make the change along with a supporting spec. This can really speed up getting to the final result.
- unshavedyak 3y ago
  I feel like there's too many files (lots of out-of-file references) to do that easily. Probably is fine for something like Copilot, but manually feeding it to ChatGPT is not something i've had much faith in
samatman 3y ago
So I wanted to take a heatmap and bin it into fifteen values on a logarithmic basis. So I asked ChatGPT to do it for me, and it just worked. Would this have been difficult for me to just write? No. I wouldn't call it difficult. But it would have involved effort, which is a resource I'm happy to conserve. It's like the difference between a sandwich you make and a sandwich you ask someone to make. Then I asked it to generate the integer ranges which correspond to each bucket. It screwed that one up, which I found out by copying the function to a scratch file and trying some representative values in the REPL. So I told it to iterate all the values between in and max and generate the ranges that way. That one worked. Net of less effort, plus I had a test for it which I could copy-paste from the REPL to the test suite. Faster? Maybe, maybe not. But I'm rate-limited by gumption, not minutes. When it's easier to describe the function than write it, and it's simple enough that the robot won't screw the pooch, I hand it off to the LLM. It's a great addition to the toolkit.
okdood64 3y ago
The co-pilot equivalent tool I use makes me about 10-15% more productive. Noticeable but not life changing.

oblio 3y ago

IMO a chunk of it is like Peel developers: people that prioritize their own speed above all else: readability, team reviews, etc. I'd love to be proven wrong.

010101010101 3y ago

I rarely find interfacing with an external chat interface useful, but integration with the coding environment (e.g. Copilot) is an immediate productivity boost.

swatcoder 3y ago

Some revered novelists spend all day to write a single page and others are able to get in a flow and produce a chapter in that same time. Without getting into touchy questions of quality and talent and the whole 10x trope, there are a lot of working engineers out there that produce code a lot more slowly than others and that work on more common problems than others. My sense is copilot-like products provide the biggest boon to those people and are a lot harder for people who are more naturally prolific or who work on more esoteric things.

holoduke 3y ago
Have you ever tried it?. It sounds like you are a bit against the idea of an AI supporting your work.

freedomben 3y ago

It all seems to depend on what you are doing. The more niche and technical the task, the less the AI can help. If you are just generating crud and points for a common web language and framework, it can be an 80% boost. I think the real problem with this is that people aren't differentiating these different types of work when they give these numbers.

ickyforce 3y ago
It's not just the type of work but also experience. Here are two cases: 1. After working for many years in Java I needed to build a service. I spent few days designing it and then a month on implementation. I used DBs and libraries I knew very well. I didn't need to access google/stackoverflow, I didn't need to look up names of (std)lib methods and their parameters and if something wasn't working it was fairly obvious what I needed to change. 2. Recently I wanted to create a simple page which fetched a bunch of stuff from some URLs and showed the results, simple stuff. But with React since that was what frontend team was using. I never used React and rarely touched web in the recent years. Most of my time was spent googling about React and how exactly CORS/SOP work in the browsers, and with polishing it took a couple of days. I'm pretty sure that in case 1) AI wouldn't help me much. Maybe just as a more fancy code completion. In case 2) AI would probably be a significant time save. I could just ask it to write some draft for me and then I could make few tweaks, without having to figure out React. But somehow nobody quantifies their experience with the languages/tools when they are using AI - I'm sure there's a staggering difference between 1 month and 10 yoe.

azeirah 3y ago

For myself I have several distinct cognitive weaknesses that I can often just unload onto an AI in a conversational style. For instance I know I'm good at breaking up large tasks into smaller ones, but because planning and executive functioning is by far my worst energy consuming skill (adhd) I can save a lot of energy (but not time) by approaching it conversationally. I'd often use colleagues for the same thing, but then my productivity costs 2 salaries Similarly, I have some trouble with memory and cognitive speed when I'm tired which is unfortunately often the case due to my health, I know well enough what I kinda "want" to do and I let the AI generate something that comes near what I need and I can work from there once I have the right starting point. Just my personal experience I'd wanted to share.

holoduke 3y ago

Its usually with simple things like code completion on logging, boiler plate, repetitive tasks etc. I am surprised sometimes how copilot knows what my next step is. I am typing in the start of an algorithm and copilot gives me the rest. And it predicts a lot of things correctly. It saves me tons of time. Another thing what i like is that I no longer need to no all the programming language related syntax. In the past I looked up stuff on stackoverflow. Now i simply type a short comment like "reverse the array...". Copilot automatically suggests the right syntaxes. Sometimes need some adjustments, but thats fine.

block_dagger 3y ago

Try this: in a situation where you need a small change to an existing class that you haven't looked at in a long time, dump the code and spec to ChatGPT with a request to add the feature or make the change along with a supporting spec. This can really speed up getting to the final result.

unshavedyak 3y ago
I feel like there's too many files (lots of out-of-file references) to do that easily. Probably is fine for something like Copilot, but manually feeding it to ChatGPT is not something i've had much faith in

samatman 3y ago

So I wanted to take a heatmap and bin it into fifteen values on a logarithmic basis. So I asked ChatGPT to do it for me, and it just worked. Would this have been difficult for me to just write? No. I wouldn't call it difficult. But it would have involved effort, which is a resource I'm happy to conserve. It's like the difference between a sandwich you make and a sandwich you ask someone to make. Then I asked it to generate the integer ranges which correspond to each bucket. It screwed that one up, which I found out by copying the function to a scratch file and trying some representative values in the REPL. So I told it to iterate all the values between in and max and generate the ranges that way. That one worked. Net of less effort, plus I had a test for it which I could copy-paste from the REPL to the test suite. Faster? Maybe, maybe not. But I'm rate-limited by gumption, not minutes. When it's easier to describe the function than write it, and it's simple enough that the robot won't screw the pooch, I hand it off to the LLM. It's a great addition to the toolkit.

okdood64 3y ago

The co-pilot equivalent tool I use makes me about 10-15% more productive. Noticeable but not life changing.