[baryphonic]

Honestly, this has been predictable since the beginning of GPT-3 and Copilot. Programmers tend to overestimate how much time we spend sitting down banging on the keyboard, and management severely overestimates it. Even when we are typing code, much of the time we maintaining code already written rather than creating greenfield code out of whole cloth. So a system that is by design oriented toward creating new things out of whole cloth will be missing a lot of what programmers must do.

GPT-4 makes enough errors when I use it to generate code that my chats with it become excessively long where I am effectively feeding it error messages until it makes something that will at least parse or compile. Having to maintain those over time seems like it would be a nightmare, much worse than the often mediocre tooling programmers are used to.

I'm not anti-LLM, but the hype around them has been unbelievable, and I suspect that's part of the reason for these immense layoffs over the past 18 months. LLMs make me more productive, but I would honestly be terrified to depend on a product that relied on LLMs in its critical path.

[add-sub-mul-div]

> Programmers tend to overestimate how much time we spend sitting down banging on the keyboard,

Definitely. And if you truly master it, the idea that you'd need to stop and talk to an AI in English to get things done becomes truly absurd.