[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?

[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.

[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.