Compared to the era before AI coding tools (say, ~2 years ago), if you had to put a number on it, how much has your productivity as a SWE changed?
I think about this a lot; am keen to hear what others' perceptions are. For me; the short answer: about 2x (i.e. 100% faster than pre LLMs). Long answer:
When I thoroughly understand the domain (i.e. business logic and real world problem I'm solving), and am familiar with the tech stack, I'm about ~10x faster for the same or better code quality.
When I don't understand the domain, prompts will be ambiguous or inadequate, the LLM will guess, it will do a month's work in a day, but I'll spend the next 3 weeks refactoring and realising how trash the code was, due to how trash the prompt was. All in all, it's probably still faster than pre AI, but can give a demoralising psychological phenomena where you think something's nearly completed only to spend weeks debugging it, refactoring, and often tossing it away and starting over.
In an unfamiliar tech stack, I can't always spot obvious mistakes (mistakes caused by the AI or the prompt), so it's less productive and more risky.
10-15% of the productivity improvement is due to improvements in the dev environment. I open ~/dotfiles with cursor and tell it a problem I have or ask for a specific improvement. It usually modifies .zshrc, .vimrc or similar (and iterates as necessary if the first attempt didn't work). Due to how fast this is (e.g. 5 minutes), I've made about 20 little tweaks that previously didn't justify the time. They definitely make me happier as well as a bit more productive.
But overall, taking everything into account, I'd say I'm about 2x as productive as before LLMs.
Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46409375
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