[johnfn]

I am a professional engineer with around 10 years of experience and I use AI to work about 5x faster on a site I personally maintain (~100 DAU, so not huge, but also not nothing). I don’t work in AI so I get no financial benefit by “reinforcing this meme”.

[danpalmer]

Same position, different results. I'm maybe 20% faster. Writing the code is rarely the bottleneck for me, so there's limited potential in that way. When I am writing the code, things that I'd find easy and fast are a little faster (or I can leave AI doing them). Things that are hard and slow are nearly as hard and nearly as slow when using AI, I still need to maintain most of the code in my head that I'd need to without AI, because it'll get things wrong so quickly.

I think what you're working on has a huge impact on AI's usability. If you're working on things that are simple conceptually and simple to implement, AI will do very well (including handling edge cases). If it's a hard concept, but simple execution, you can use AI to only do the execution and still get a pretty good speed boost, but not transformational. If it's a hard concept and a hard execution (as my latest project has been), then AI is really just not very good at it.

[leshow]

Oh, well if it can generate some simple code for your personal website, surely it can also be the "next level of abstraction" for the entirety of software engineering.

[johnfn]

Well, I don’t really think it’s “simple”. The code uses React, nodejs, realtime events pushed via SSE, infra pushed via Terraform, postgres, blob store on S3, emails send with SES… sure, it’s not the next Google, but it’s a bit above, like, a personal blog.

And in any case, you are moving goalposts. OP said he had never seen anyone serious claim that they got productivity gains from AI. When I claim that, you say “well it’s not the next level of abstraction for all SWE”. Obviously - I never claimed that?

[leshow]

If you want my opinion, I think LLMs can be pretty good at generating simple code for things you can find on stackoverflow and require minor adjustments. Even then, if you don't really understand the code you can have major issues.

Your site is case in point of why LLMs demo well but kind of fall apart in the real world. It's pretty good at fitting lego blocks together based on a ton of work other people have put into React and node or the SSE library you used, etc. But that's not what Karpathy is saying, he's saying "the hottest programming language is english".

That's bonkers. In my experience it can actually slow you down as much as speed you up, and when you try to do more complicated things it falls apart.

[johnfn]

I don't really see how my site is "falling apart in the real world". It is a real site used by real people in the real world. It is not falling apart.

[leshow]

I am agreeing with you, LLMs can be useful for simple code generation where you're primarily plugging existing components together.

[johnfn]

Again, that’s not what my website is. It’s not simple code generation and I’m not just plugging things together.

[gejose]

> on a site I personally maintain (~100 DAU, so not huge, but also not nothing)

This is what the parent said.

> some simple code for your personal website

This is your (reductive) characterization of their work. That's fine, but please keep in mind that that's your inference, not what the parent said.

[iLoveOncall]

> either not generally fluent in programming or stand to benefit financially from reinforcing this meme

Then figure out which one of the two you are. Years of experience have never equated competence.

[johnfn]

Blindly asserting that everyone who disagrees with you is a shill or incompetent seems unlikely to be conducive to good discourse.

[iLoveOncall]

You seem to say that it's not the truth. I disagree.