Also this article is immensely distracting.
To put it simply, it doesn’t matter if AI does 80% of the work if that last 20% takes 5x longer. As long as you need a human in the loop who understands the code, that human is going to have to spend the normal amount of time understanding the problem.
It seems to me that LLM output creates a similar situation.
But we have to endure these tedious self-congratulatory "mwa ha well it's still not as good as my code" posts.
No shit. Nobody is saying AI can write a web browser or a compiler or even many far simpler things.
But it can do some very simple things like making basic websites. And sure it gets a lot of stuff wrong and you have to correct it, or fix it yourself. But it's still usually faster than doing everything manually.
This post feels like complaining about cruise control because it isn't level 5 autonomy. Nobody should use it because it doesn't do everything perfectly!
It's nothing like that, because cruise control works reliably. There is never a situation where cruise control randomly starts going 90mph or 10mph while I have it set to 60mph. LLMs on the other hand...
This is why I disagree with people who argue (as you did) "it really does speed up simple tasks". No it doesn't, because even for simple tasks I have to check its work every time. In less than the time it takes me to do that, I could've written the code myself. So these tools slow me down, they don't speed me up.
This hasn't been my experience at all. At worst you skim the code and think "nah that's total nonsense, I'll write it myself from scratch", but that only takes a few seconds. So at worst it wastes a few seconds.
Usually though it spits out a load of stuff, which definitely requires fixing up and tweaking, but is usually way faster than doing it all.
Obviously it depends on the domain too. I wouldn't ask it to write a device driver or something UVM or whatever. But a website interface? Sure. "Spawn a process in C and capture its stdout"? Definitely. There's no way you are doing that faster by hand.
a) More knowledge than the most senior developers b) Can work at ridiculous throughput 24/7
Please provide evidence to back up your claim here: papers, studies, etc.
Otherwise this claim can really only be dismissed as being exaggerated / untrue / naive.
https://twitter.com/leojr94_/status/1901560276488511759
https://twitter.com/leojr94_/status/1902537756674318347
Good thing this guy wasn't in charge of an actual business, because if he was it would have been killed overnight.
However, on small tasks and bug fixes, it often fixes the bug before I've even root caused it. It's amazing when I can focus on throwing it information about the bug then have it think in the background while I continue researching. In a surprising number of simpler cases, it one-shots the fix and eliminates any need to root cause (this is a bit easier when it's a feature you understand intimately).
The cycle of tool and framework re-skilling is constant in industry, and those trying to fight the wave always lose. And this one is a tidal wave. UPDATE YOUR SKILLS FOLKS!