“An experienced programmer told me he's now using AI to generate a thousand lines of code an hour.“
https://x.com/paulg/status/2026739899936944495
Like if you had told pg to his face in (pre AI) office hours “I’m producing a thousand lines of code an hour”, I’m pretty sure he’d have laughed and pointed out how pointless that metric was?
pg wrote a Lisp dialect, Arc, with Morris. The Morris from "the Morris worm". These people are at the very least hackers and they definitely know how to code.
I don't think a "not good programmer" can write a Lisp dialect. At least of all the "not good" programmers I met in my life, 0% of them could have written a Lisp dialect.
It's not because Arc didn't reach the level of fame of Linux or Quake or Kubernetes or whatever that pg is not a good programmer.
(Also, writing a Scheme dialect was a first-semester CS problem set - if you're in a 1980s academic CS environment it was more effort to not accidentally write a lisp interpreter into something, something in the water supply...)
You can write a lisp in 145 lines of Python: https://norvig.com/lispy.html
Wasn't Arc just a collection of Scheme macros?
When I see PG write something like that, it signals to me that he has embraced AI hype to the point that he is displaying poor taste and embracing a risky technical practice.
It's unsurprising he would believe LLM coding tools are a productivity boon, but using code quantity as a measure of software development progress is one of the most famously wrong ideas in the software world. Either he wrote carelessly, or he believes that LLM tools have changed that reality.
I'm inclined to think LLM tools haven't substantially changed that reality. LLMs perform better when more of the problem fits in context, so succinctness remains valuable.