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- Hacker News
- I recently removed about 50% of code in a feature submitted by a colleague, because it's a pile of over-engineered mess that either never gets used or caused trouble for us. We probably would not have added the code in the first place if we actually discussed the design. With the code removed, the feature is now much simpler and more maintenable.
And that's the second time this happened over the past few months.
by fg137 - There's someone I know that jumped head-first into AI... they have embraced everything agentic. While setting up mail on their new iphone they encountered a problem. They had claude go through and do a bunch of tests against the server... allegedly. It didn't do any actual testing, though it did generate a long-winded report of what it pretended to try, fully blaming the server the whole time.
Actual problem: he typed in the wrong password
by bigbuppo - I'm probably in the 5x-10x range, but we are a very small team, and we've been accumulating a backlog of ideas over the years. I drive the architecture, and have almost complete autonomy over the work I do. I think someone in my shoes will see a greater result than someone trying to do the same thing in large team, with all the usual process and ceremony, only wanting to go faster.by bdcravens
- The way I see it you should calibrate the way you work with LLMs based on how confident you are on that specific area, and if it's your responsibility to own/understand it. Here's how it feels for me:
* Learning stage: 0.5x - 1x. I change my system prompt to teacher mode, taking the productivity hit for actually learning the system/tool pays off dividends later. I change my system prompt to "teacher mode" and slowly loosen it as I get more confident.
* Working-knowledge: 2x - 3x. Once I am ramped up enough I feel like I can get a decent productivity boost. Most of the time is spent at the planning stage. This is my mode for areas I don't really own or care about, just need to get work done.
* Mastered: 10x+ I have been doing web front end for 12+ years, I can quickly review plan/implementations and for my initial prompt I already know most of what I want built.
1x == my speed before AI
by lazopm - This reminds me of themes I recently saw in [Harness Engineering is not Enough: Why Software Factories Fail](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ib5GBkD555M) (Warning: the last 3 slides seem like an advertisement). One thing I liked is how Dex has a little graphic he glossed over showing software development is
- 25% planning & aligning with other teams
- 25% coding
- 25% testing/verifying
- 25% code review/rework
One argument was that agentic coding speeds up that coding part a bunch. So maybe there's 2x speedup in coding. But that's only a small speedup in the totality of everything software engineers do.
by gashad - I have a weird issue with using AI for coding. I can code something entirely by myself at my baseline speed; call it 1x. Or I can use Claude to do it, and it does it in 1/10 - 1/4 of the time. The problem, however, is that to review Claude’s code properly takes 2-3x the amount of time it would have taken me to write it all by hand.
So my two choices are basically “YOLO, LGTM” and hope I can revert if it breaks something, or to just write all the code by hand from the start. With the increased pressure for output, I’ve noticed both myself and coworkers tending more toward “commit and hope it works” over time. It’s sort of perverse incentives in a way...
by Xcelerate - I'm probably a weird outlier. Coming from academia, it's ranging from 1x to infinity-x (as in, certain tasks wouldn't even be touched if not for AI).
For stuff that I'm used to (R) I can write nice and compact spaghetti (long %>% pipes). I'm not comfortable when a working script doesn't fit the screen (plus a few scrolls max). My style is probably easy only to me. When I teach, I don't teach it in particular.
AI gives me thousands of lines of codes for those. 10k once. It's cool if it suffices to source it all, but working with that is not pleasant.
But if I can reproduce a paper in a one-shot (it used to be an hour, but recently it got so much better), that's a task that would not have been even attempted years ago. And I'm talking about a methods paper with no available Github (or, as often happens, when the existing Github is useless)
by 5555watch - While I agree with the premise, I think this angle only applies on work one was going to do no matter what. The real power of these tools is that there are so many ideas people would like to try, but never have the time or motivation to pursue.
So the comparison is not only "built with and without LLM" but "would you even build this if you didn't have the LLM?". The gap in productivity in this case is much more wide.
by pantelisk