Always good to read Yegge. But as with Joel back in the day, with this kind of post you have to separate the meat from the marketing.

It seems clear that LLM’s are going to be decent as assistants, but the 5x claim is BS and the marketing part of the post. Most of software development isn’t coding, it’s testing and experimenting and bug fixing and refactoring and documenting and interacting with other people and often companies.

If we get to the point where an LLM can get assigned a Jira ticket, make a bug fix, slack the PM for clarification on the ticket, debug the code, write regression tests, etc, then that will be something.

Right now? It’s a much improved Clippy with a very big set of knowledge behind it. When it’s embedded in the SDLC, that will e something. If we ever get there.