[gormen]

The cost of code never lived in the typing — it lived in the intent, the constraints, and the reasoning that shaped it. LLMs make the typing cheap, but they don’t make the reasoning cheap. So the economics shift, but the bottleneck doesn’t disappear.

[locknitpicker]

> LLMs make the typing cheap, but they don’t make the reasoning cheap.

LLMs lower the cost of copy/pasting code around, or troubleshooting issues using standard error messages.

Instead of going through Stack Overflow to find how to use a framework to do some specific thing, you prompt a model. You don't even need to know a thing about the language you are using to leverage a feedback loop.

LLMs lower the cost of a multitude of drudge work in developing software, such as having to read the docs to learn how a framework should be used to achieve a goal. You still need to know what you are doing, but you don't need to reinvent the wheel.

[beagle3]

For most non-hobby project, the cost of code was in breaking a working system (whether by a bona fide bug, or a change in some unspecified implicit assumption). That made changes to code incredibly expensive - often much more than the original implementation.

It sounds harsh, but over the lifetime of a project, 10-lines/person/day is often a high estimate of the number of lines produced. It’s not because humans type so slow - it is because after a while, it’s all about changing previously written lines in ways that don’t break things.

LLMs are much better at that than humans, if the constraints and tests are reasonably well specified.

[LtWorf]

> if the constraints and tests are reasonably well specified.

if they are, then why would a human be so slow? You're not comparing the same situation.

[theshrike79]

Because humans need to type with a keyboard, then click around with a mouse.

In that time the LLM has made a change, ran tests, committed, pushed, checked that the CI build failed, looked at the CI logs, fixed the issue and the PR is now passing.

[LtWorf]

In what world is an LLM generating text faster than you can type?

They are certainly slower than me at text generation.

[simonw]

Wow you must be fast at typing!

Can you beat this one? https://chatjimmy.ai/

(It is to be fair running a pretty trash model, a quantized Llama 3.1 8B from ~18 months ago)

[LtWorf]

if I type nonsense like that thing, sure.

[gbalduzzi]

The human in that case is not "so slow", but at the current state it is slower than an LLM as simple as that.

The difference comes in confidence that the solution works and can be maintained in the future, but in terms of purely making the decisions and applying the changes an LLM is faster when it has all the required infos available

[saezbaldo]

Agree, and I'd add: the feedback loop between decision and consequence got dramatically shorter. You can test an architectural hypothesis in hours instead of weeks. That part is genuinely powerful.

But faster feedback also means bad decisions propagate faster. The skill isn't generating three implementations in parallel -- it's knowing which one won't page you at 3am. That judgment comes from having been paged at 3am enough times to recognize the patterns.

[simonw]

> The skill isn't generating three implementations in parallel -- it's knowing which one won't page you at 3am.

100% this.

[dematz]

Brother saezbaldo is llm

[alexhans]

It doesn't disappear but it does easy up some instances of fighting configuration, documentation, syntax or even comparing three approaches that are similar but you don't know their full effect.

I think it's a very fun space, finally being able to empower many people who in the past wouidve been bottlenecked unless they were using very simple tools for their domain and upskilled enough. Those 2 things will still be true, but the speed at which some things can happen at the exploration and other layers has seen a significant speedup.

Other problems like entropy/slop, security, system testing, lack of automation fundamentals arise but it's a good problem to start tackling.

I'm very focused on evals [1] because is what allows me to not to be the bottleneck with economists who I want to empower to code end to end and I'd like that mental shift to happen for anyone becoming a builder so non traditional developers and developers by trade have a common language for product building [2]. That part of speaking to different audiences and combating hype that promises to do everything for you Vs the intent that's actually needed is hard, but trying gets you to advance quite a lot.

[1] https://alexhans.github.io/posts/series/evals/measure-first-...

[2] https://ai-evals.io