[semanticjudo]

The author has implied a false dichotomy: positioning the article as “it does 10x or it does nothing” (my paraphrasing) is disingenuous and hyperbolic. My experience is that on several tasks professional devs, including myself, can get to an answer much faster than pre-LLM. For example, I’ve never had to use SQL frequently enough to become an expert. Prior to LLMs, creating queries beyond the basic would take an hour of Googling and keyboard head banging (or find an expert to help who is invariably doing their own job). Now, the same thing takes 6 minutes. Arguably 10x faster for this task. But since I don’t do this often nor have 40 other examples like this, I’d never claim it makes me 10x more productive. But I DO run into 5 or 6 of this and similar examples a week and several others of smaller magnitude. And that has a meaningful impact on my productivity. I could go on to describe in what ways I can see this productivity improvement but the primary point is that it is not all or nothing. An LLM might make me 20% more productive across my week and that is still a big deal when compared with just not having it.

[eesmith]

I don't think the author suggest a 10x-or-bust dichotomy. From the end of the piece:

> I expect LLMs have definitely been useful for writing minor features or for getting the people inexperienced with programming/with a specific library/with a specific codebase get started easier and learn faster. They've been useful for me in those capacities. But it's probably like a 10-30% overall boost, plus flat cost reductions for starting in new domains and for some rare one-off projects like "do a trivial refactor".

That "10-30% overall boost" matches your "20% more productive" pretty well.