[threeseed]

a) There is no up-skilling needed to use LLMs. They are very basic to use.

b) Many of us have used them for a while now and can speak from experience that they aren't providing a meaningful productivity boost. Simply because they don't work well enough to provide a positive ROI. And no amount of prompting expertise can change that.

c) For me it is junior developers who love these tools because they think it's a shortcut to becoming experienced. But it's akin to cheating. You're not actually learning why and how things are supposed to work. And that will hurt you in professional environments where you often need to explain why you wrote that code and introduced that bug.

[allisdust]

Your (1) is not matching with (2) because there are anecdotes contrary to yours (the tweet in question and my personal one). I have close to 2 decades of experience in a variety of languages and frameworks and never felt this powerful and liberated with any of the previous tools.In the past year I have developed 2 complex products nearing market launch with just me on a part time basis.

My professional colleagues continue to feel the exact same way you feel and despite my best efforts refuse to even bother using them for anything. Using LLMs might appear to be simple and the prompt length might be similar between an experienced user vs naive one but the way intent is conveyed varies with skill level.

My only complaints about LLMs are: 1) Context is still a limiting factor (so only medium sized projects) 2) I have to still copy paste the code (no IDE truly helps here)

What has improved in the past 6 months: Sonnet happened and I no longer have to worry about the code being wrong or that it contains obvious mistakes. In many cases where I thought it got it wrong turned out to be a clever way to minimize the number of changes needed/clever ways to do more with less. We are approaching the point where humans no longer are intelligent enough to appreciate the LLMs.

[threeseed]

I look forward to the day that I can be "intelligent enough" to truly appreciate LLMs. Maybe I need to buy a course from someone on X.

And not from months of experience using Claude where it over and over again will give me algorithms that are wrong, assure me every time it is right and do so using versions of libraries that are typically a year or more old.

[simonw]

"There is no up-skilling needed to use LLMs. They are very basic to use."

Hard disagree on that. Using LLMs effectively is deceptively deep. Sure, anyone can throw a prompt at a chatbot - but I've been using them on an almost daily basis for over two years at this point and I still feel like I'm finding out new ways to improve my prompting several times a week.

I talked more about how hard they are to use here: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Jun/27/ai-worlds-fair/#slide....

"Many of us have used them for a while now and can speak from experience that they aren't providing a meaningful productivity boost."

I'm getting a meaningful productivity boost, which gets more meaningful the more time I spend learning how best to apply them.

[Kiro]

We are many professionals that share Karpathy's opinion on this and know for a fact that it provides a very meaningful productivity boost. It may not be for everyone but I can absolutely not imagine going back, and can confidently say it's not just junior developers that love these tools.