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Comment by n8cpdx | Hacker News Reader

If you read my comments, you’ll see that I did no such thing. I asked if you did 5-10 years of work in the last year (or 5-10 weeks of work in the last week) and didn’t get a response until you accused me of denying your reality.

You’ll note the pattern of the claims getting narrower and narrower as people have to defend them and think critically about them (5-10x productivity -> 4-5x productivity -> 4-5x as much code written on a side project).

It’s not a personal attack, it is a corrective to the trend of claiming 5,10,100x improvements to developer productivity, which rarely if ever holds up to scrutiny.

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What you are seeing is the difference between what I personally feel and what I could objectively prove to an AI skeptic.

If I have to "prove" my productivity in a court of law - that is to say, you - I'll down-modulate it to focus on the bits that are most objective, because I understand you will be skeptical. For instance, I really do think I'm 10x faster with Terraform, because I don't need to read all the documentation, and that would have taken absurd amounts of time. There were also a few nightmarish bugs that I feel could have taken me literally hours or infinity (I would have just given up), like tracking down a breaking change snuck in in a TS minor update when I upgraded from 2.8 to latest, that Codex chomped through. But I imagine me handwaving "it's definitely 10x, just trust me" on those ones, where the alternatives aren't particularly clear, might not be an argument you'd readily accept. On the other hand, the 5x gains when writing my website, using tech I know inside and out, felt objective.

> For instance, I really do think I'm 10x faster with Terraform, because I don't need to read all the documentation, and that would have taken absurd amounts of time.

I think this is where the lede is buried. Yes, it takes time up front. But then you learn(ed) it and can apply those skills quickly in the future.

In 10 years when all sorts of new tech is around, will you read the docs? Or just count on an LLM?

I mean, in my comment I did say that an AI skeptic probably wouldn't buy that argument. So I'm not too surprised that you're not buying it.

That being said, I have taught myself a ridiculous amount of tech with AI. It's not always great at depth, but it sure is amazing at breadth. And I can still turn to docs for depth when I need to.

> I mean, in my comment I did say that an AI skeptic probably wouldn't buy that argument. So I'm not too surprised that you're not buying it.

Makes sense. I’d probably be less skeptical if a/ we had a definition of AI and b/ people stopped calling LLMs “AI”

It is really neat tech. It is absolutely “artificial” and it absolutely is not “intelligent”

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