[bambax]

> code that would have taken me years of work to produce without LLMs

As you might suspect, this is what I have an issue with. Without LLMs, isn't it possible or even likely that that code wouldn't have been written at all, and wouldn't have been missed? If LLMs are mostly used to produce throwaway prototypes then it's a stretch to say that's money well spent.

If indeed it let you advance your main product much faster then sure it's a different story. You're the judge of that. It's hard to see the impact from the consumer side; everything is still broken and no extraordinary app seems to be emerging. Maybe it's just a question of time. We'll see.

[simonw]

I've thought about this a lot. I am very confident that the way I use LLMs is both accelerating progress on my core projects (here's a substantial, reviewed PR I landed just yesterday https://github.com/simonw/datasette/pull/2741) and helping me create plenty of projects that otherwise would not have existed.

[tredre3]

The point being made by GP was that your projects have no value and their non-existence wouldn't be a negative to this world.

And that is likely a fair assessment, though I understand perfectly the feeling that you have that you are accomplishing great(er) things thanks to AI.

[simonw]

I certainly hope that's not true, given that I've dedicated 7+ years to my main open source projects at this point.

I take some reassurance from knowing that they are indeed used by real people to solve real problems though.

[jwpapi]

Now what percentage of the 200$ have been used on the useful stuff and how much on exploration or other stuff.

How long would it taken you to do it yourself? How much longer will the next task take you, compared to when you would’ve written the code yourself. How is the mental model compared to when you would’ve written it yourself?.

I’m not saying you’re wrong, again there are use cases. But the calculation is not plain and simple it goes deep into our perception, perceived productivity versus actual productivity.

I’ve 2 months maxxed out all 6k of Claude Code and bought Antigravity on top. My codebase became 140k lines. I introduced tons of bugs and spent another 2 months, deleting 80k of code. I wish I would’ve just chatted with AI and not let agents touch my codebase. I would’ve saved approx 300$ subscription prices a month and 2 months of my life.

[simonw]

I had that experience back in January! I used it for a joke in a talk recently... did anyone really need a half-finished buggy slow implementation of a JavaScript interpreter in Python? They did not. https://github.com/simonw/micro-javascript

It's taken me the best part of this year to readjust and find a pace and level of ambition that fits.

[jwpapi]

It was challenging for me as well, but my pace and level is now that I use it for these cases at the moment:

New language, infrastructure, general level of understanding of something I barely have an idea of.

Rubber duck debugging, if i dont know the correct solution

Checking my code for issues and bugs.

But not for:

- writing my code - agentic coding (help me)

The inference has reduced drastically. It’s basically just chatting. I don’t let it write anything, but sometimes I purposely use the browser window instead of them sitting in my codebase, because I know it gets things subtly wrong and migth focus on the wrong things.

The same way people used to say don’t copypaste code at least write it out I think it’s still true. It helps to buidl the mental model and to find the right abstractions.

[bambax]

I was certainly not saying that all the author's projects, in general, have no value! That would be rude, mean and most of all, incorrect.

But yes, it's likely that the ease of which code can now be outout lets us produce lots of unnecessary code just because we can, and the author says as much in a below comment

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48303890

[jonluca]

This is the economic theory of value creation though - arguably the world is better off because new projects can be created, and they are marginally cheaper than they would have been previously

[odyssey7]

I’m watching to see what happens to big enterprise software contracts. Why pay some vendor $800k annually for something a couple mid-level devs can replace—-and tailor closely to your needs——by leveraging AI.

Open source software changed the world. AI that will cheaply write whatever you want in a few days will also change the world.