Comment by stavros | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stavros | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Well, here's an even more insane claim: I'm infinity times more productive, as I just wouldn't even start projects without the LLM to sidestep my ADHD. Then, when the LLM invariably fucks up, I step in and finish things myself!

Here are a few projects that I made these past few months that wouldn't have been possible without LLMs:

* https://github.com/skorokithakis/dracula - A simple blood test viewer.

* https://www.askhuxley.com - A general helper/secretary/agent.

* https://www.writelucid.cc - A business document/spec writing tool I'm working on, it asks you questions one at a time, writes a document, then critiques the idea to help you strengthen it.

* A rotary phone that's a USB headset and closes your meeting when you hang up the phone, complete with the rotary dial actually typing in numbers.

* Made some long-overdue updates on my pastebin, https://www.pastery.net, to improve general functionality.

* https://github.com/skorokithakis/support-email-bot - A customer support bot to answer general questions about my projects to save me time on the easy stuff, works great.

* https://github.com/skorokithakis/justone - A static HTML page for the board game Just One, so you can play with your friends when you're physically together, without needing to bring the game along.

* https://github.com/skorokithakis/dox - A thing to run Dockerized CLI programs as if they weren't Dockerized.

I'm probably forgetting a lot more, but I honestly wouldn't have been bothered to start any of the above if not for LLMs, as I'm too old to code but not too old to make stuff.

EDIT: dang can we please get a bit better Markdown support? At least being able to make lists would be good!

Did you make any money off any of that or was it all just labors of love type of stuff? I'm enjoying woodworking...

This is all my hobby, for my job I use Claude in a way that doesn't involve code, but is still very useful. It's basically what inspired Lucid, above, when I realized I find coming up with solutions very easy, but find explaining them very hard, because I assume the other person knows too much and I don't elaborate enough.

LLMs are a great rubber duck, plus they can write the document for you at the end.

Well done, some of these projects look cool.

Although I was just commenting on the irony of the parent comment.

What was the irony? I thought you were referring to the "3x speed" part as the insane statement.

To me it seems like an arbitrary number that I'm not even sure how someone could accurately measure it but maybe I've missed something :)

I took it as a ballpark of how the GP felt, rather than a rigorous measurement.

Which would be ironic as LLM usage has been observed to increase the sensation of productivity even when productivity is measurably reduced. Not to mention the "vibe" component of vibe coding

It's actually not arbitrary! I measure my PR rate / ticket close rate before and after, which are generally tied to agreed on features / bugs (often user requested / reported ones). I think if it were commit rate or lines of code it would be less meaningful, but at least a (non refactoring) PR should indicate some level of increased user value / bug fix. Sure we could categorize it further and break it down more effectively, I'll not die on the sword of 3x, maybe its 1.5x, maybe its 4x. Neither seems a very meaningful difference when the comparison being discussed is 0x or even -X. The latter I think _most_ of the time is going to be prompt or task related, which is why I think its so important to share and discuss (particularly the negative case!)

> EDIT

hn has no markdown support at all right now. It's just this https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

Hm, well, since we are on a Sonnet thread, I might give it a go.

> dang can we please get a bit better Markdown support?

Great use case for an LLM to make these changes as HN is open source. It’ll also tell us if LLMs can go beyond JS slop.

> I'm infinity times more productive, as I just wouldn't even start projects without the LLM to sidestep my ADHD.

1 is not infinitely greater than 0.

It... literally is?

Or otherwise, can you share what you think the ratio is?

No, 1 is 1 more than 0. There’s a certain sense in which you could say that 1 is infinitely greater than 0, but only in an abstract, unquantifiable way. In this case, it doesn’t make sense to say you’re “infinitely more productive” because you’re producing something rather than nothing.

I just read it as a turn of phrase that says exactly that, that it means they produce something rather than nothing.

Only if you think that the phrase "two times more productive" is also nonsensical.

It goes like this:

"For any positive "x", is 1 x times greater than 0? Well, 0 times x is lower than 1, and 1 divided by x is larger than 0."

So his productivity increased by more than twice, more than ten times, more than a billion times, more than a googol times, more than Rayo's number. The only mathematically useful way to quantify it is to say his productivity is infinitely larger. Unless you want to settle for "can't be compared", which is less informative.

I think it's a pedantic point, but maybe they just meant that talking about 1 being multitudes greater than 0 implies multiplication. And since 1/0 is undefined that doesn't make much sense.

Someone attributing all of their productivity to a given tool and none to their own ingenuity and experience is allocating 100% credit to that tool.

It is not a ratio, it is a proportion.

Also, not invented here syndrome (NIH) is cool again.

Given that most of the 'vibe-coded' projects that I have seen that are worse versions of software that have been tested and stand the test of time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com