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Comment by alexvitkov | Hacker News Reader

If LLM chatbots are making you vastly more productive in a field, you are in the bottom 20% of that field.

They're still useful tools for exploring new disciplines, but if you're say a programmer and you think ChatGPT or DeepSeek is good at programming, that's a good sign you need to start improving.

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This. I shudder to think of the hubris of a programmer who doesn’t understand pointers prompting an AI model to generate low-level system code for them. Sure it might generate a program that appears to work. But is that human reading the code qualified to review it and prevent the model from generating subtle, non-obvious errors?

Linus Trovalds: bottom 20% coder.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHHT6W-N0ak&pp=ygUMTGludXMgQ...

Linus hasn't coded in decades, let the man retire in peace.

If you have to tell others that then perhaps some introspection for yourself might be helpful. Comes across more as denial than constructive commentary.

I do believe the benefit decreases the more senior or familiar the work is but there is still a noticeable benefit and I think it largely depends on the velocity and life cycle of the product. I think you get less benefit the slower the velocity or the more mature of a product. To deny it like in your post is simply being an intellectual minimalist.

I see a gap between "vastly more productive" and "noticeable benefit".

good shoes help me walk a bit faster, and for longer.

they don't let me walk at the pace of a SUV.

AI is like the good shoes. they help, and make many tasks a bit easier. but they can't make me into an SUV.

and if they can, then no programmers will have jobs. which is the end-state of this whole LLM thing as far as I can tell.

I have a good shoes business. Can you give me a couple of 100 billions of dollars? Good news I promise you trillions, in a year or two or 10 maybe, who knows you can exprapolate into a future science fiction reality yourself. So when are you transfering the money?

You are now moving the goal post from us discussing is this adding value to how much is it worth. There are a lot of open debate to some of the level of investment but from the hyperscaler territory, they are flush with cash and it probably hurts more under invest and be wrong than it is to over invest.

Again, show your evidence.

You make a polite but still ad hominem "attack" about me instead of addressing my points with demonstrations of evidence.

Make a video or blog article actually showing how your use of LLMs in coding is making you more productive. Show what it's doing to help you that has a multiplier effect on your productivity.

I was not replying to you so I hope your comment was not directed at me?

Oh I see, I had replied to your comment directly where I was stating that I find it surprising that folks like yourself are so quick to attack, though looking at your response here its not that surprising.

I don't think it deserves a video or blog, like I already said the multiple posts that have made HN front page have covered it well. - Autocomplete saves me keystrokes usually - Features like Cursor's composer/agent allow me to outsource junior level changes to the code base. I can copy/paste my requirements and it gives me the diffs of the changes when its done. Its often at a junior level or better and tackles multi-file changes. I usually kick this off and go make other changes to the code base.

Now like I have said before, this depends a lot on the velocity of the team and the maturity of the code base. I think more mature products you will have less benefit on feature implementation and most likely more opportunity in the test writing capabilities. Likewise, teams with a slower cadence, thinking a bluechip software company compared to a startup, are not going to get as much benefit either.

Instead of being so aggressive, simply say why it does not work for you. These tools strive in web dev which you may not be involved in!

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