[InsideOutSanta]

That's one dimension. Another is how much you care.

For my own projects, little productivity apps for my own needs, I'm easily 20x more productive. I'm building so many more of them, and at a much higher level of polish. But that's simply because I don't care about the code, long-term maintenance, or anything else. I just need them to do a thing, and if they do the thing, I'm good. I used to make an effort calculation before building these things, but now I just tell Claude "hey, build this", and two hours later it's built well enough to be useful.

OTOH, at work, I'm probably about as fast as I was before, maybe even a bit slower. But the quality of my work has increased quite a bit, because I no longer take the shortcuts I used to take to push things out. I'm spending much more time in planning and in code reviews rather than actually typing code.

Either way, the idea that these obvious changes are just people fooling themselves is, at this point, no longer a reasonable position. And the claim that "AI will run out of money and just be turned off due to the huge operational cost" is so implausible that I would feel ashamed of myself if I used this as a straw man for what AI skeptics believe.

[dingaling]

I understand what you're saying about side projects but it just sounds... like buying a landscape wall print from IKEA instead of taking a photo and having it printed on canvas.

My non-work projects are exercises for the brain and for learning, and if instead I could just automagic them into existence they'd feel hollow and almost cheating.

[InsideOutSanta]

Sure, it's cheating if you want to frame it like that. But it's still a huge boost in productivity.

[breuleux]

Is it? Genuine question. Say you didn't do these things at all -- what would that change to your life? Are you gaining productivity in high-impact things, or stuff that might scratch an itch but you don't really need all things considered?

[braebo]

Productivity is a measure of progress towards a goal, not a judgment of whether that goal is worth pursuing.

[argee]

As Charlie Munger would say, something that isn’t worth doing at all sure as heck isn’t worth doing well.

[InsideOutSanta]

> what would that change to your life?

Sure, let me give you an example. I bought an Xteink X4 recently so I always have something to read with me. I have a huge dump of epubs from Humble Bundle and other sources. I used to just copy them to my e-book readers and then never read anything because it's impossible to find.

I had Claude write a Python script that sorts the books into a file system structure according to Language → Genre → Sub-Genre → Author. Now the device is actually useful, because I can easily find whatever book I want to read, and it has resulted in my reading much more.

> Are you gaining productivity in high-impact things, or stuff that might scratch an itch but you don't really need all things considered?

I technically don't need much. You could lock me in a room and give me stale bread and water once a day. So I'm not sure why you're applying that standard to the usefulness of LLMs, and I'm not sure what you consider "high-impact things". I'm doing high-impact things for me, but maybe you disagree.

So let me ask you this instead: did you write these types of comments in the past, when people manually built software? If I manually wrote a Python script to sort my books, would you post a comment questioning whether that changed anything in my life?

A lot of the criticism leveled against using LLMs in software development is just criticism against software development in general. Do we really need all this software? I guess not. Can we objectively measure the productivity of software developers? Not really.