I'd just like to see a live coding session from one of these 10x AI devs
Like genuinely. I want to get stuff done 10x as fast too
Like genuinely. I want to get stuff done 10x as fast too
I can code with Claude when my mind isn't fresh. That adds several hours of time I can schedule, where previously I had to do fiddly things when I was fresh.
What I can attest is that I used to have a backlog of things I wanted to fix, but hadn't gotten around to. That's now gone, and it vanished a lot faster than the half a year I had thought it would take.
Just Christmas Vacation (12-18h days): https://git.sr.ht/~kerrick/ratatui_ruby/log/v0.8.0
Lastest (slowed down by job & real life): https://git.sr.ht/~kerrick/ratatui_ruby/log/trunk and https://git.sr.ht/~kerrick/ratatui_ruby-wiki/log/wiki and https://git.sr.ht/~kerrick/ratatui_ruby-tea/log/trunk
> I'd just like to see a live coding session from one of these 10x AI devs
I mean I really need to understand what the "x" is in 10x. If their x is <0.1 then who gives a shit. But if their x is >2 then holy fuck I want to know.
Who doesn't want to be faster? But it's not like x is the same for everybody.
Now that I've seen what the AI/agents can do, those estimates definitely reek, and the frontend "senior" javascript dev's days are numbered. Especially for CRUD screens, which lets face it, make up most screens these days and should absolutely be churned out like in an assembly line instead of being delicate "hand crafted" precious works of art that allows 0.1x devs to waste our time because they are the only ones who supposedly know the ancient and arcane 'npm install, npm etc, npm angular component create" spells.
Look at the recent Tailwind team layoffs, they're definitely seeing the impact of this as are many team-leads and managers in most companies in our industry. Especially "javascript senior dev" heavy shops in the VC space, which many people are realizing they have an over-abundance of because those devs bullshitted entire teams and companies into thinking simple CRUD screens take weeks to develop. It was like a giant cartel, with them all padding and confirming the other "engineer's" estimates and essentially slow-devving their own screens to validate the ridiculous padding.
Frontend engineers do more than just churning out code. Still have to do proper tests using Cypress/Playwright, deal with performance, a11y/accessibility, component tests, if any, deal with front end observability (more complex than backend, out of virtue of different clients and conditions the code is run on), deal with dependencies (in large places it's all in-house libraries or there's private repos to maintain), deal with CI/CD, etc, I'm probably missing more.
Twcs layoffs were due to AI cannibalizing their business model by reducing traffic to the site.
And what makes you think the backend is safe? As if churning out endpoints and services or whatever gospel by some thought leader would make it harder for an AI to do. The frontend has one core benefit, it's pretty varied, and it's an ever moving field, mostly due to changes in browsers, also due to the "JS culture". Code from 5 years ago is outdated, but Spring code from 5 years ago is still valid.
This has been a while; perhaps the latest frameworks account for all of that better than they used to. But at that time, I could absolutely see budgeting several days to do what seems like a few hours of work, because of all of the testing and revision.
If you're an expert in a field, LLMs might just provide a 2-3x speedup as boilerplate generators.
With the AI writing the UI are you still getting the feedback loop so that the UI informs your backend design and your backend design informs the UI design? I think if you don't have that feedback loop then you're becoming worse of a backend designer. A good backend still needs to be front end focused. I mean you don't just optimize the routines that your profiler says, you prioritize routines that are used the most. You design routines that make things easier for people based on how they're using the front end. And so on.
But how I read your comment is that there's no feedback loop here and given my experience with LLMs they're just going to do exactly what you tell it to. Hamfisting a solution. I mean if you need a mockup design or just a shitty version then yeah, that's probably fine. But I also don't see how that is 20x since you could probably just "copy-paste from stack overflow", and I'd only wager a LLM is really giving you up to 2x there. But if you're designing something actual people (customers) are going to use, then it sounds like you're very likely making bad interfaces and slowing down development. But it is really difficult to determine which is happening here.
I mean yeah, there's a lot of dumb coders everywhere and it's not a secret that coding bootcamps focus on front ends but I think you're over generalizing here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941
It's not just about them (link, Oracle), there is terrible code all over the place. Games, business software, everything.
It has nothing to do with the language! Anyone who claims that may be part of the problem, since they don't understand the problem and concentrate on superficial things.
Also, what looks terrible may not be so. I once had to work on an in-house JS app (for internal cost reporting and control). It used two GUI frameworks - because they had started switching to another one, but then stopped the transition. Sounds bad, yes? But, I worked on the code of the company I linked above, and that "terrible" JS app was easy mode all the way!
Even if it used two GUI frameworks at once, understanding the code, adding new features, debugging, everything was still very easy and doable with just half a brain active. I never had to ask my predecessor anything either, everything was clear with one look at the code. Because everything was well isolated and modular, among other things. Making changes did not affect other places in unexpected ways (as is common in biology).
I found some enlightenment - what seems to be very bad at first glance may not actually matter nearly as much as deeper things.
Anecdotally the worst code I've ever seen was in a PHP codebase, which to me, would be the predecessor of JavaScript in this regard, bolstering many junior programmers maintaining legacy (or writing Greenfield ) systems due to cheap businesses being cheap. Anyways, thousands long LoC files, with broken indentation and newlines, interspersed JS and CSS here and there. Truly madness, but that's another story. Point is JavaScript is JavaScript, and other fields like systems and backend, mainly backend, act conceited and talk about JS as if it was the devil, when things like C++, Java, aren't necessarily known for having pretty codebases.
Sure buddy.
Even as a slight fan, I'd never claim more than 10-20% all together. I could maybe see 5x for some specific typing heavy usages. Like adding a basic CRUD stuff for a basic entity into an already existing Spring app.
It is like if someone says they are losing weight eating 2500 calories a day and someone else says that is impossible because they started eating 2500 calories and gained weight.
Neither are making anything up or being untruthful.
What is strange to me is that smart people can't see something this obvious.
I don’t. I mean I like being productive but by doing the right thing rather than churning out ten times as much code.