> At the is point the best evidence we have is a large volume of extremely experienced programmers - like antirez - saying "this stuff is amazing for coding productivity".

The problem is that we know that developers' - including experienced developers' - subjective impressions of whether LLMs increase their productivity at all is unreliable and biased towards overestimation. Similarly, we know that previously the claims of massive productivity gains were false (no study reputable showed even a 50% improvement, let alone the 2x, 5x, 10x, etc that some were claiming, indicators of actual projects shipped were flat, etc). People have been making the same claims for years at this point, and every time when we actually were able to check, it turned out they were wrong. Further, while we can't check the productivity claims (yet) because that takes time, we can check other claims (e.g. the assertion that a model produces code that doesn't need to be reviewed by a human anymore), and those claims do turn out to be false.

> If you're determined to say "I refuse to accept appeal to authority here, I demand a solution to the measuring productivity problem first" then you're probably in for a long wait.

Maybe, but my point still stands. In the absence of actual measurement and evidence, claims of massive productivity gains do not win by default.

There is also plenty of extremely experienced programmers saying "this stuff is useless for programming".

Check "confirmation bias": of course the few that speak loudly are those who:

- want to sell you AI

- have a popular blog mostly speaking on AI (same as #1)

- the ones for whom this productivity ehnancement applies

but there's also 1000's of other great coders for whom:

- the gains are negligible (useful, but "doesn't change fundamentally the game")

- we already see the limits of LLMs (nice "code in-painting", but can't be trusted for many reasons)

- besides that, we also see the impact on other people / coders, and we don't want that in our society

Many issues have been pointed in the comments, in particular the fact that most of the things that antirez speaks about is how "LLMs make it easy to fill code for stuff he already knows how to do"

And indeed, in this case, "LLM code in-painting" (eg let the user define the constraints, then act as a "code filler") works relatively nicely... BECAUSE the user knows how it should work, and directed the LLM to do what he needs

But this is just, eg, 2x/3x acceleration of coding tasks for good coders already, this is neither 100x, nor is it reachable for beginner coders.

Because what we see is that LLMs (for good reasons!!) *can't be trusted* so you need to have the burden of checking their code every time

So 100x productivity IS NOT POSSIBLE simply because it would be too long (and frankly too boring) for a human to check the output of 100x of a normal engineer (as long as you don't spend 1000 hours upfront trying to encode all your domain in a theorem-proving language like Lean and then ensure the implementation is checked through it... which would be so costly that the "100x gains" would already have disappeared)