The only regularity I can discern in contemporary online debates about LLMs is that for every viewpoint expressed, with probability one someone else will write in with the diametrically opposite experience.

Today it’s my turn to be that person. Large scientific code base with a bunch of nontrivial, handwritten modules accomplishing distinct, but structurally similar in terms of the underlying computation, tasks. Pointed GPT Pro at it, told it what new functionality I wanted, and it churns away for 40 minutes and completely knocks it out of the park. Estimated time savings of about 3-4 weeks. I’ve done this half a dozen times over the past two months and haven’t noticed any drop off or degradation. If anything it got even better with 5.4.