[belmarca]

I have just stepped down from a CTO job where I built a FinTech's stack from the ground up. I leveraged a Claude Max plan for about 8 months and I can say with absolute certainty I would not have been as productive without it. I have barely written any code by hand during that time, but I did read almost every single line of code produced. My role was much more that of an "editor", as another article posted here mentioned. There is no doubt in my mind that you can be very highly productive with AI, it's just not the magical silver bullet some people market it as. I have a lot of notes describing the process that I'm considering publishing.

Just yesterday I was interviewing for a very interesting job and I completely flunked the coding question in an unacceptable way for my level of experience. The question was easy, I just couldn't get past some syntactic issues. For 8 months, Claude wrote all of my Python classes and Pydantic types. Now I had to write a dataclass, and because I always just resorted to standard classes before the advent of LLMs, I stumbled. And froze. And panicked. And that was it. Of course you could say I should have just scrapped the dataclass and written it as a simple class. The point is I felt very, very stupid. LLMs suddenly felt like a huge disadvantage.

All this to say I disagree with LLMs "rotting" my brain. Quite the opposite, I know that it's possible to use LLMs to be efficient and correct. It's more the actual mechanical act of writing that gets rusty.

[snowe2010]

Wait, your final outlook on the situation isn’t that the LLM rotted your brain? Are you sure that this isn’t a case of “I refuse to believe I could have done the wrong thing for 8 months”?

[belmarca]

I didn't "do the wrong thing" for 8 months. I built reliable, robust software that did what it was designed for.

Would you say calculators rot brains?

Did the invention of writing rot the brain?

[snowe2010]

There’s zero chance you know if your code is robust, it’s barely had any time in production. Comment back in two years.

Something degrading because of lack of use is literally the definition of rotting. If you forgot how to multiply then yeah, calculators rotted your brain. If you never knew how to multiply then no. You clearly knew how to write code before and now you don’t. Rotting.

[belmarca]

I would say about 80% of the code was in "production". Obvious hiccups were fixed after a few weeks of running. The platform was collecting, transforming, distributing data as designed without any major issues. The financial code was heavily tested by a PhD Wall Stree quant. The less tested parts were the front-end and the swarm itself under load.

And to clarify: I didn't "forget" how to code. I froze for a moment, after relying on a tool to write for me for most of a year. More like rusting.

[wiseowise]

Ooh, don’t feel sad. They’ve just hadn’t caught up to revolution yet. And let’s not use the bad S word! Let’s call it “temporarily agent deprived”. Just buy another $200 subscription and it will be okay again.