alt Hacker News"I find LLMs useful as a sort of digital clerk - searching the web for me, finding documentation, looking up algorithms. I even find them useful1 in a limited coding capacity; with a small context and clear guidelines."
I am curious why the author doesn't think this saves them time (i.e. makes them more productive).
I never had terribly high output as a programmer. I certainly think LLMs have helped increased the amount of code that I can write, net total, in a year. Not to superhuman levels or even super-me levels, just me++.
But, I think the total time spent producing code has gone down to a fraction and has allowed me more time to spend thinking about what my code is meant to solve.
I wonder about two things: 1. maybe added productivity isn't going to be found in total code produced, because there is a limit on how much useful code can be produced that is based on external factors 2. do some devs look at the output of an LLM and "get the ick" because they didn't write it and LLM-code is often more verbose and "ugly", even though it may work? (this is a total supposition and not an accusation in any way. i also understand that poorly thought out, overly verbose code comes with problems over time)
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It seems you find LoC as a measure of productivity. This would answer your question as to why the author does not find it makes them more productive. If total output increases, but quality decreases (which in terms of code means more bugs) then has productivity increased or has it stayed the same?
To answer my own question, if you can pump out features faster but turn around and spend more time on bugs than you do previously then your productivity is likely net neutral.
There is a reason LoC as a measure of productivity has been shunned from the industry for many, many years.
I feel like it makes me more productive, but I am not even sure it does even with my light usage. How do we even measure it?
> "get the ick"
> even though it may work?
The first of those is about taste, and it's real, and engineers with bad taste write unstable buggy systems.
The second of those is about priority. If all you want is functional code, any old thing will do. That's what I do for one-off scripts. But if you plan to support the code at 2am when exposed to production requests on the internet, you need to understand it, which is about legibility and coherence.
I hope you do have taste, and I hope you value more than simple "it works" tests. But it might be worth looking there for why some struggle with LLM output.
For what it's worth, I use coding agents all the time, but almost never accept their output verbatim outside of boilerplate code.