Yeah! I mean, who needs to LEARN how to to these things properly when you can just let an autocorrect on steroids hallucinate the closest thing to “barely working”. Right?
10 to 30 hours saved on not learning new things! Hurray!
10 to 30 hours saved on not learning new things! Hurray!
What do you mean by "barely working"? I can now put more iterations into getting things working better, more quickly, with less effort. That seems good to me.
10 to 30 hours a week is 25% to 75% of my time working. Seems like a pretty good trade?
I do understand that the calculation is different for people who are new to this. And I worry a lot about how people will build their skills and expertise when there is no incentive to put in all the tedious legwork. But that just isn't the phase of my career that I'm in...
1. A week where I would have otherwise actually spent the majority of my time writing out and doing a ton of refactoring of a lot of implementation code. This is very rare for me, but it does exist. I can remember how it could actually take me a whole week to just "code up" meaningfully sized prototypes or greenfield implementations of some unambiguous thing. Truly, now, for that kind of work, claude code can save me full days of mechanical work.
2. A week where there is something very subtle going on that I have to figure out, probably having to do with some component or system I'm not very familiar with yet. Having an AI tool as a rubber ducky, or like a supercharged stackoverflow, can save me days of reading, debugging, working on minimal repros, etc.
Again, I'm not saying this is the common case at all. And estimating this kind of thing is always wildly inaccurate, so sure, take it with a grain of salt. But I know that a few times now, doing estimates based on my past experience, I've said "that will take me a week" (in case #1) or "gosh, I dunno, that's a tricky one, that might take me a week to figure out" (in case #2), and instead it only took me a day.
But honestly I think people focus too much on the high end of this range. The more valuable thing to me is the large number of weeks where it saves me that 10 to 15 hours, where I can then use that time to research new things, try more ideas, say "yes" to more things, or just not spend that time working.
My time is spent more on editing code than writing new lines. Because code is so repetitive, I mostly do copy-pasting, using the completion and the snippets engine, reorganize code. If I need a new module, I just copy what’s most similar, remove everything and add the new parts. That means I only write 20 lines of that 200 lines diff.
Also my editor (emacs) is my hub where I launch builds and tests, where I commit code, where I track todo and jot notes. Everything accessible with a short sequence of keys. Once you have a setup like this, it’s flow state for every task. Using LLM tools is painful, like being in a cubicle reading reports when you could be mentally skiing on code.
My 2023 to early 2025 usage of AI was as "slight improvement to my existing editing and autocomplete capabilities". That was great and I loved it. But sometime over the last 12 months it has switched to "mostly using the editor pane to read rather than edit".
Honestly I experience this as a great loss. All these hours over all these years perfecting the vim editing movements! And now I only spend like 10% of my time directly editing things anymore.
I feel like it would be fun (and also sad and nostalgic) to see a time lapse of the relative size and time spent focused between my editor pane, terminal pane, and AI tool pane. It has changed massively, especially in the last year.