[ignoramous]

> [David, Former staff engineer at Google ... CTO of Tailscale,] doesn't need LLMs. That he says LLMs make him more productive at all as a hands-on developer, especially around first drafts on a new idea, means a lot to me...

Don't doubt for a second the pedigree of founding engs at Tailscale, but David is careful to point out exactly why LLMs work for them (but might not for others):

   I am doing a particular kind of programming, product development, which could be roughly described as trying to bring programs to a user through a robust interface. That means I am building a lot, throwing away a lot, and bouncing around between environments. Some days I mostly write typescript, some days mostly Go. I spent a week in a C++ codebase last month exploring an idea, and just had an opportunity to learn the HTTP server-side events format. I am all over the place, constantly forgetting and relearning.

  If you spend more time proving your optimization of a cryptographic algorithm is not vulnerable to timing attacks than you do writing the code, I don't think any of my observations here are going to be useful to you.

[big_youth]

> If you spend more time proving your optimization of a cryptographic algorithm is not vulnerable to timing attacks than you do writing the code, I don't think any of my observations here are going to be useful to you.

I am not a software dev I am a security researcher. LLM's are great for my security research! It is so much easier and faster to iterate on code like fuzzers to do security testing. Writing code to do a padding oracle attack would have taken me a week+ in the past. Now I can work with an LLM to write code and learn and break within the day.

It has accelerated my security research 10 fold, just because I am able to write code and parse and interpret logs at a level above what I was able to a few years ago.

[pplonski86]

I'm in similar situations, I jump between many environments, mainly between Python and Typescript, however, currently testing a new idea of learning algorithm in C++, and I simply don't always remember all syntax. I was very skeptical about LLMs at first. Now, I'm using LLMs daily. I can focus more on thinking rather than searching stackoverflow. Very often I just need simple function, that it is much faster to create with chat.

[JKCalhoun]

And if anyone remembers: before Stack Overflow you more or less had to specialize in a domain, become good using a handful of frameworks/API, on one platform. Learning a new language, a new API (god forbid a new platform) was to sail, months long, into seas unknown.

In this regard, with first Stack Overflow and now LLMs, the field has improved mightily.