alt Hacker News> While I’m certain that this technology is producing some productivity improvements, I’m still genuinely (and frustratingly) unsure just how much of an improvement it is actually creating.
I often wonder how much more productive I'd be if just a fraction the effort and money poured into LLMs was spent on better API documentation and conventional coding tools. A lot of the time, I'm resorting to using an AI because I can't get information on how the current API of some-thing works into my brain fast enough, because the docs are non existent, outdated, or scattered and hard to collate.
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As someone who does broad activities, it supercharges a lot of things. Having a critical eye is required though. I estimate 40%-60% improvements on basic coding tasks.
I don't bring huge codebases to it.
Yeah I get this impression too. AI feels like it's papering over overwrought and badly designed frameworks, tech stacks with far too many things in them, and also the decline of people creating or advocating for really expressive languages.
Pragmatic sure, but we're building a tower of chairs here rather than building ladders like a real engineering field.
then you should be delighted we have LLMs one of the use cases they are best suited to is writing documentation, much better than humans can.
My favorite thing is when some projects now have better documentation in their Claude skills or MCPs than they ever did for users.