I'm going to try and be honest with you because I'm where you were at 3 months ago

I honestly don't think there's anything I can say to convince you because from my perspective that's a fools errand and the reason for that has nothing to do with the kind of person either of us are, but what kind of work we're doing and what we're trying to accomplish

The value I've personally been getting which I've been valuing is that it improves my productivity in the specific areas where it's average quality of response as one shot output is better than what I would do myself because it is equivalent to me Googling an answer, reading 2 to 20 posts, consolidating that information together and synthesising an output

And that's not to say that the output is good, that's to say that the cost of trying things as a result is much cheaper

It's still my job to refine, reflect, define and correct the problem, the approach etc

I can say this because it's painfully evident to me when I try and do something in areas where it really is weak and I honestly doubt that the foundation model creators presently know how to improve it

My personal evidence for this is that after several years of tilting those windmills, I'm successfully creating things that I have on and off spent the last decade trying to create successfully and have had difficulty with not because I couldn't do it, but because the cost of change and iteration was so high that after trying a few things and failing, I invariably move to simplifying the problem because solving it is too expensive, I'm now solving a category of those problems now, this for me is different and I really feel it because that sting of persistent failure and dread of trying is absent now

That's my personal perspective on it, sorry it's so anecdotal :)

I think people get into a dopamine hit loop with agents and are so high on dopamine because its giving them output that simulates progress that they don't see reality about where they are at. It is SO DAMN GOOD AT OUTPUT. Agents love to output, it is very easy to think its inventing physics.

Obviously my subjective experience

> What I then saw was him struggling for one hour with some simple extension to his project. He didn't manage to finish in the hour what he was planning to. And when I had some thought about how much time it would have cost me by hand, I found it would have taken me just as long.

For all who are doing that, what is the experience of coding in a livestream? It is something I never attempted, the simple idea makes me feel uncomfortable. A good portion of my coding would be rather cringe, like spending way too long on a stupid copy-paste or sign error that my audience would have noticed right away. On the other hand, sometimes, I am really fast because everything is in my head, but then I would probably lose everyone. I am impressed when looking at live coders by how fluid it looks compared to my own work, maybe there is a rubber duck effect at work here.

All this to say that I don't know how working solo compares to a livestream. It is more or less efficient, maybe it doesn't matter that much when you get used to it.

I feel like I've been incredibly productive with AI assisted programming over the past few weeks, but it's hard to know what folks' baselines are. So in the interest of transparency, I pushed it all up to sourcehut and added Co-Authored-By footers to the AI-assisted commits (almost all of them).

Everything is out there to inspect, including the facts that I:

- was going 12-18 hours per day

- stayed up way too late some nights

- churned a lot (+91,034 -39,257 lines)

- made a lot of code (30,637 code lines, 11,072 comment lines, plus 4,997 lines of markdown)

- ended up with (IMO) pretty good quality Ruby (and unknown quality Rust).

This is all just from the first commit to v0.8.0. https://git.sr.ht/~kerrick/ratatui_ruby/tree/v0.8.0

What do you think: is this fast, or am I just as silly as the live-streamer?

P.S. - I had an edge here because it was a green-field project and it was not for my job, so I had complete latitude to make decisions.

There were such people also here.

Copy-pasting the code would have been faster than their work, and there were several problems with their results. But they were so convinced that their work is quick and flawless, that they post a video recording of it.

> So I answered him in his LinkedIn thread and asked where the 10x speed up was. What followed was complete denial. It had just been a hick up. Or he could have done other things in parallel while waiting 30 seconds for the AI to answer. Etc etc.

So I’ve been playing with LLMs for coding recently, and my experience is that for some things, they are drastically faster. And for some other things, they will just never solve the problem.

Yesterday I had an LLM code up a new feature with comprehensive tests. It wasn’t an extremely complicated feature. It would’ve taken me a day with coding and testing. The LLM did the job in maybe 10 minutes. And then I spent another 45 minutes or so deeply reviewing it, getting it to tweak a few things, update some test comments, etc. So about an hour total. Not quite a 10x speed up, but very significant.

But then I had to integrate this change into another repository to ensure it worked for the real world use case and that ended up being a mess, mostly because I am not an expert in the package management and I was trying to subvert it to use an unpublished package. Debugging this took the better part of the day. For this case, the LLM may be saved me maybe 20% because it did have a couple of tricks that I didn’t know about. But it was certainly not a massive speed up.

So far, I am skeptical that LLM’s will make someone 10x as efficient overall. But that’s largely because not everything is actually coding. Subverting the package management system to do what I want isn’t really coding. Participating in design meetings and writing specs and sending emails and dealing with red tape and approvals is definitely not coding.

But for the actual coding specifically, I wouldn’t be surprised if lots of people are seeing close to 10x for a bunch of their work.

I suspect there's also a good amount of astroturfing happening here as well, making it harder to find the real success stories.

I've noticed a similar trend. There seems to be a lot of babysitting and hand holding involved with vibe-coding. Maybe it can be a game changer for "non-technical founders" stumbling their way through to a product, but if you're capable of writing the code yourself, vibe coding seems like a lot of wasted energy.

Shopify's CEO just posted the other day that he's super productive using the newest AI models and many of the supportive comments responding to his claim were from CEOs of AI startups.

Even if this would take two, three hours and a vibe coder, still cheaper then a real developer

Theres too much money, time and infrastructure committed for this to be anything but successful.

Its tougher than a space race or the nuclear bomb race because there are fewer hard tangibles as evidence of success.

Sounds like someone trying to sell a course or something.

Maybe he would have otherwise struggled for 10 hours on that extension.

10 times zero is still zero!

You're supposed to believe in his burgeoning synergy so that one day you may collaborate to push industry leading solutions

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