5 ms·

True but the n00b is very fast. A lot of coaching is waiting for the n00b to perform tasks and meta things about motivation. These LLM are extremely fast and ea

True but the n00b is very fast. A lot of coaching is waiting for the n00b to perform tasks and meta things about motivation. These LLM are extremely fast and eager to work. I don't need a study to tell me that five projects that have been stuck in slow plodding along waiting for me to ever have time or resources for nearly ten years. But these are now nearing completion after only two months of picking up Claude Code. And with high-quality implementations that were feverdreams. My background is academic science not professional programming though and the output quality and speed of Claude Code is vastly better than what grad students generate. But you don't trust grad student code either. The major difference here is that suggestions for improvement loop in minutes rather than weeks or months. Claude will get the science wrong, but so do grad students. (But sure technically they are not finished yet ... but yeah)

dingnuts 1y ago
LLMs might make you feel faster (which helps with motivation!) and help with some of the very easy stuff but the critical part of your anecdote is that you haven't actually completed the extra work. The projects are only "NEARING" completion. I think that's very telling.
- victorbjorklund 1y ago
  If the easy things are done faster you xan spend more time on the hard stuff. No need to spend 2 hours on making the UI for the MVP when an AI can make a decent UI in 2 min. Means you have 2 hours more to spend on the hard stuff.
  - SpicyLemonZest 1y ago
    Unless, as is often the case in my experience, the hard stuff consists largely of fixing bugs and edge cases in your implementation of the easy stuff. I've seen multiple people already end up forced back to the drawing board because their "easy stuff" AI implementation had critical flaws they only realized after they thought they were done. It's hard to prove counterfactuals, but I'm pretty confident they would have gotten it right the first time if they hadn't used AI, they're not bad engineers.
- fluidcruft 1y ago
  Congratulations! You repeated my joke? lol But in all seriousness, completion is not the only metric of productivity. I could easily break it down into a mountain of subtasks that have been fully completed for the bean counters. In the meantime, the code that did not exist 2 months ago does exist.
victorbjorklund 1y ago
100% this. The AI missunderstands and make a mistake? No problem. Clarify and the AI will come back with a rewrite in 30 sec.
- bigfishrunning 1y ago
  A rewrite with another, more subtle mistake. That you must spend energy discovering and diagnosing.
  - fluidcruft 1y ago
    How is that different from working with a n00b except that it only took 30sec to get to the next bug rather than a week?
    - bigfishrunning 1y ago
      The junior engineer will grow into a senior engineer
      - bayarearefugee 1y ago
        > The junior engineer will grow into a senior engineer And then quit after accepting a new job that pays them their modified value, because tech companies are particularly bad at proactive retention.
        Kirth 1y ago
        .. and because the job and environment weren't that pleasant or rewarding to offset that delta in income offered elsewhere at an equally drab employer
        arcanemachiner 1y ago
        Which has nothing to do with the argument you're responding to.
exe34 1y ago
> I don't need a study to tell me that five projects that have been stuck in slow plodding along waiting for me to ever have time or resources for nearly ten years. that's the issue in the argument though. it could be that those projects would also have been completed in the same time if you had simply started working on them. but honestly, if it makes you feel productive to the point you're doing more work than you would do without the drug, I'd say keep taking it. watch out for side effects and habituation though.
- fluidcruft 1y ago
  I don't think that's correct. That could be true if I were primarily a programmer, but I am not. I'm mostly a certified medical physicist working in a hospital. Programming is a skill that is helpful and I have spent my programming time building other tools that I need. But that list is gigantic, the software that is available for purchase is all complete crap, the market is too small for investment, etc. That's all to say the things I am building are desperately needed but my time for programming is limited and it's not what brings home the bacon and there's no money to be made (beyond consulting, essentially these things might possibly work as tools for consultants). I don't have resources for professional programming staff but I have worked with them in the past and (no offense to most of HN) but the lack of domain knowledge tends to waste even more of my time.
  - tehjoker 1y ago
    You are very fortunately in the perfect slot for where LLM has a lot of bang for the buck.
- pessimizer 1y ago
  You've added an implicit assumption that this person spends more time programming now than they used to, rather than continuing to commit time at the same rate but now leading to projects being completed when they previously got bogged down and abandoned. There are any number of things you could add to get you to any conclusion. Better to discuss what is there. I've had the same experience of being able to finish tons of old abandoned projects with AI assistance, and I am not spending any more time than usual working on programming or design projects. It's just that the most boring things that would have taken weeks to figure out and do (instead, let me switch to the other project I have that is not like that, yet) have been reduced to hours. The parts that were tough in a creative fun way are still tough, and AI barely helps with them because it is extremely stupid, but those are the funnest, most substantive parts.

dingnuts 1y ago

LLMs might make you feel faster (which helps with motivation!) and help with some of the very easy stuff but the critical part of your anecdote is that you haven't actually completed the extra work. The projects are only "NEARING" completion. I think that's very telling.

victorbjorklund 1y ago
If the easy things are done faster you xan spend more time on the hard stuff. No need to spend 2 hours on making the UI for the MVP when an AI can make a decent UI in 2 min. Means you have 2 hours more to spend on the hard stuff.
- SpicyLemonZest 1y ago
  Unless, as is often the case in my experience, the hard stuff consists largely of fixing bugs and edge cases in your implementation of the easy stuff. I've seen multiple people already end up forced back to the drawing board because their "easy stuff" AI implementation had critical flaws they only realized after they thought they were done. It's hard to prove counterfactuals, but I'm pretty confident they would have gotten it right the first time if they hadn't used AI, they're not bad engineers.
fluidcruft 1y ago
Congratulations! You repeated my joke? lol But in all seriousness, completion is not the only metric of productivity. I could easily break it down into a mountain of subtasks that have been fully completed for the bean counters. In the meantime, the code that did not exist 2 months ago does exist.

victorbjorklund 1y ago

100% this. The AI missunderstands and make a mistake? No problem. Clarify and the AI will come back with a rewrite in 30 sec.

bigfishrunning 1y ago
A rewrite with another, more subtle mistake. That you must spend energy discovering and diagnosing.
- fluidcruft 1y ago
  How is that different from working with a n00b except that it only took 30sec to get to the next bug rather than a week?
  - bigfishrunning 1y ago
    The junior engineer will grow into a senior engineer
    - bayarearefugee 1y ago
      > The junior engineer will grow into a senior engineer And then quit after accepting a new job that pays them their modified value, because tech companies are particularly bad at proactive retention.
      - Kirth 1y ago
        .. and because the job and environment weren't that pleasant or rewarding to offset that delta in income offered elsewhere at an equally drab employer
      - arcanemachiner 1y ago
        Which has nothing to do with the argument you're responding to.

exe34 1y ago

> I don't need a study to tell me that five projects that have been stuck in slow plodding along waiting for me to ever have time or resources for nearly ten years. that's the issue in the argument though. it could be that those projects would also have been completed in the same time if you had simply started working on them. but honestly, if it makes you feel productive to the point you're doing more work than you would do without the drug, I'd say keep taking it. watch out for side effects and habituation though.

fluidcruft 1y ago
I don't think that's correct. That could be true if I were primarily a programmer, but I am not. I'm mostly a certified medical physicist working in a hospital. Programming is a skill that is helpful and I have spent my programming time building other tools that I need. But that list is gigantic, the software that is available for purchase is all complete crap, the market is too small for investment, etc. That's all to say the things I am building are desperately needed but my time for programming is limited and it's not what brings home the bacon and there's no money to be made (beyond consulting, essentially these things might possibly work as tools for consultants). I don't have resources for professional programming staff but I have worked with them in the past and (no offense to most of HN) but the lack of domain knowledge tends to waste even more of my time.
- tehjoker 1y ago
  You are very fortunately in the perfect slot for where LLM has a lot of bang for the buck.
pessimizer 1y ago
You've added an implicit assumption that this person spends more time programming now than they used to, rather than continuing to commit time at the same rate but now leading to projects being completed when they previously got bogged down and abandoned. There are any number of things you could add to get you to any conclusion. Better to discuss what is there. I've had the same experience of being able to finish tons of old abandoned projects with AI assistance, and I am not spending any more time than usual working on programming or design projects. It's just that the most boring things that would have taken weeks to figure out and do (instead, let me switch to the other project I have that is not like that, yet) have been reduced to hours. The parts that were tough in a creative fun way are still tough, and AI barely helps with them because it is extremely stupid, but those are the funnest, most substantive parts.