[reedf1]

4x is a number I pulled out of thin air. I'm not sure I even yet believe there is a net positive effect of using AI on productivity. What I am sure about in my own workflow is that is saves me time writing boilerplate code - it is good at this for me. So I would say it has saved me time in the short-term. Now does not writing this boilerplate slow me down long-term? It's possible, I could forget how to do this myself, some part of my brain could atrophy (as the MIT study suggests). How it affects large teams, systems and the transfer of knowledge is also not clear.

[dgfitz]

I read this sentiment a lot, and it is true for me too as a completely average software engineer.

Makes it seem like the actual problem to be solved is reducing the amount of boilerplate code that needs to be written, not using an LLM to do it.

I'm not smart enough to write a language or modify one, so this opinion is strongly spoken, weakly held.

[eru]

I wouldn't be too worried about the atrophy. Or at least not much more than you already were: you get the same atrophy effect just from IDEs and compiler errors and warnings.

To give a concrete example: I'm pretty good at doing Python coding on a whiteboard, because that's what I practiced for job interviews, and when I first learned Python I used Vim without setting up any Python integration.

I'm pretty terrible at doing Rust on a whiteboard, because I only learned it when I had a decent IDE and later even AI support.

Nevertheless, I don't think I'm a better programmer in Python.