[jmchuster]

I see it analogous to asking, "How much is access to the internet boosting real-world programmer productivity?" Are you really 5-10x more productive being able to google something? Couldn't you have just looked it up in the manual, don't you have peers you can ask, that's such a small portion of the time you spend coding.

But we've now lived it so much that it sounds ridiculous to try to argue that the internet doesn't really make _that_ much of a difference.

[simonw]

I'm 20-50x more productive today compared to 25 years ago thanks to the internet being full of open source packages that solve most of the problems I run into.

Back in the late 1990s I had to build solutions to almost every problem from scratch.

[gatinsama]

I heard a programmer I respect a lot say:

"It's difficult to quantify this, but my guess for a while has been that I've had a giant productivity boost in the portion of my job which is typing code at a computer. And I would estimate I am two to three times more productive, faster at turning thoughts into working code, than I was before. But that's only 10% of my job."

But this was 5 months ago, pre-Claude 3.7.

[simonw]

That was definitely me, but I don't know where that quote is from.

[gatinsama]

Here: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/ai-tools-for-soft...