[ryanackley]

I think the relevant question isn’t what can be built but the amount of effort in comparison to doing this the old fashioned way.

What do you think the productivity gain was from using an LLM? This question assumes you’re already an experienced developer.

[andai]

n=1 but, a friend of mine spent the last few months working on an experimental music software with Claude. What he built is amazing and far beyond my abilities (I have been programming for 20 years). He doesn't know any programming.

In fact, it's far beyond what I would even attempt, because I've just spent two decades building up a data bank of how hard things are supposed to be.

He doesn't know it's supposed to be hard, so he just does it.

[dmortin]

Is his code maintainable, though? Or is it just a pile of code which happens to work? What if he wants to change something? Does he generate again the whole thing from scratch? Or does he tell Claude to make the changes and doesn't even know when something breaks when a new thing is added? (Assuming the software is complex, having multiple non trivial features.)

[andai]

Well, maintainable by who?

Claude Code does not regenerate an entire project when you ask it to make one change. It just makes the change.

He's been working on it for several hours per day for several months.

He has occasionally complained to me about the stupidity of AI. Nevertheless, his achievement is remarkable. He simply persisted despite the stupidity.

It does occasionally break things when adding new features. I think it does it less often than I do, though.

(My "random error" rate is quite high, and scales with the complexity of the code base. Fortunately, the Transformer has a slightly higher working memory than I do.)

I will grant though, that he shipped it with zero thought for performance. "Damn, it works so well on my machine though", he said, having the best machine in the world! I'm not sure that's the LLM's fault though. I ran into disregard for performance often, before LLMs!

[motoroco]

There’s no free lunch, it takes time and effort still. And expertise if you need it to be robust.

In terms of velocity, let me offer some numbers. In 6 months I generated >150k lines of code and merged 10k PRs to ship and iterate on https://plotalong.app

I follow best practices and isolate agents to continuously deployed dev environments, semi-manually review PRs and gate the release process between multiple protected envs. The project is getting close to 500 end-to-end tests in Playwright.

That’s just working nights and weekends. Before AI, it took my team at the office 4 years to produce this much work. There are some qualitative differences but the speed and results are real

[properbrew]

Thank you for the assumption, I'm actually not a developer at all.

I'm from a hardware / networking / infrastructure background. I've had extensive exposure to (web) application development as I'm working closely with development teams and I do have the bash/powershell scripting knowledge.

But honestly, if I tried this "the old fashioned way" it probably would have taken me about 6 to 7 years to develop that application, that's an optimistic estimate. You really do have to have a passion for what you're building, I didn't know that voice transcription and local LLMs would be such a driving force for me, but it's all I think about, so much that I find it hard to go to sleep sometimes.