[datpuz]

That's a big, massive if. I think the more experienced you are, the less net productivity you gain. If you're more senior, is probably very low or even negative. I use ChatGPT every day pretty much, but it has wasted quite a bit of my time.

When it does save me time, it's almost just some boilerplate I didn't have to Google or type out. Honestly, I feel like gen AI pleataued a year or more ago.

LLMs are just really convincing bullshit generators. They look impressive on the surface, and the times when they spit out a whole bunch of useful boilerplate feels like magic, but that stuff isn't super useful for a majority of the work you spend your time doing. Throwing more money at these companies is not magically going to yield AGI. I think the AI CEOs are basicallly selling us a lie.

[Magmalgebra]

I think experiences are highly variable based on the person and stack. I'd say I've gotten a ~50% productivity boost. I'm quite senior, make FAANG money.

I work in typescript, rust, and go - mostly typescript. LLM coding is an order of magnitude better at typescript than these other languages. To contrast, LLMs seem mostly useless for rust.

I also use cursor, which is a big jump over other code assistants.

And finally I understand how to prompt LLMs accurately. This is a new tool and from interacting with coworkers in the same codebase I can say many smart people have not yet learned how to use the tools effectively.

But if you just assume that everyone catches up to where I am today with cursor + typescript the change is massive.

[Izkata]

One of my co-workers is going all in with one of them in his IDE, as part of a pilot program for using it at our company, and ever since it seems like he's gotten dumber, but by outside metrics he's probably "more productive": Merge requests that don't work (in a whole variety of ways), going really fast by opening new merge requests without fixing the old ones, local changes with no thought to the larger structure, and so on. About half the time I feel like I'm spending more time commenting on these merge requests than if I'd just done it from scratch.

[tokioyoyo]

I disagree. The more senior you are, the easier it is to generate something and be convinced that "ok, this is good enough" or "aight, I see these things that need to be changed instantly". Frankly, compared to others, I don't have that much experience (about 10+ish years), but it saves quite a lot of time for me.

It takes a bit time to build intuition around the workflow, but when you get going, it seems surprisingly useful. I was a skeptic before as well, btw.