[wccrawford]

I think that it's not a multiplier on skills.

It's a reducer of time.

For less experienced developers, it's an immediately reduction at the start of a project. But then they will almost certainly have problems later when their initial decisions come back to haunt them.

For senior devs, it's like having a junior or mid-level dev that will instantly do things within their capability, so long as it's explained to them well enough. This junior dev will do things fairly smartly, but any important decisions left to them will be wholly or subtly wrong. And the subtle ones are the worst ones, because they're so hard to detect.

But if that senior dev sets the guidelines well enough, and notices the problems, development is so, so, so much faster. It's wild.

[steve_adams_86]

> I think that it's not a multiplier on skills.

I'm not sure. It's a reducer on time to refine and adopt skills, if you're interested. I know that's somewhat pedantic, but there really is a skill multiplier if that's what you want out of it.

I'm far, far better at using AWS than I was after years of using it (for better or worse). I use the command line more effectively than ever. These are real skills that have come to me as a result of that reduction of time to get the answers I wanted. This applies to all kinds of things in my work, and it's been quite liberating to have this incredible tightening of temporal scales in order to get where I'd like to be, resulting in actual differences in my own outputs and capabilities.

Still, I agree that time really is a key facet. I could have found this information before, too. It just took so long to do it.

[QuercusMax]

It can spit out a utility bash or python script lightning fast, which is a real game changer.

I wanted to run a stupid little webserver on one of my raspis, so I just asked Gemini to write my the code, along with a bash script to set up the proper configs to run as a systemd service. Nothing I couldn't basically do in my sleep, but it takes some amount of time and focus to do.

In the time it took me to write this comment, it wrote exactly what I needed. Not that impressive in isolation, but now I've been doing all the little home automation things I never had the energy for with other responsibilities.