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Comment by rfw300 | Hacker News Reader

It’s definitely the case that there are some programming workflows where LLMs aren’t useful. But I can say with certainty that there are many where they have become incredibly useful recently. The difference between even GPT-4 last year and C3.5/GPT-4o this year is profound.

I recently wrote a complex web frontend for a tool I’ve been building with Cursor/Claude and I wrote maybe 10% of the code; the rest with broad instructions. Had I done it all myself (or even with GitHub Copilot only) it would have taken 5 times longer. You can say this isn’t the most complex task on the planet, but it’s real work, and it matters a lot! So for increasingly many, regardless of your personal experience, these things have gone far beyond “useful toy”.

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The sooner those paths are closed for low-effort high-pay jobs, the better, IMO. All this money for no work is going to our heads.

It's time to learn some real math and science, the era of regurgitating UI templates is over.

I don’t want to be in the business of LLM defender, but it’s just hard to imagine this aging well when you step back and look at the pace of advancement here. In the realm of “real math and science”, O1 has improved from 0% to 50% on AIME today. A year ago, LLMs could only write little functions, not much better than searching StackOverflow. Today, they can write thousands of lines of code that work together with minimal supervision.

I’m sure this tech continues to have many limitations, but every piece of trajectory evidence we have points in the same direction. I just think you should be prepared for the ratio of “real” work vs. LLM-capable work to become increasingly small.

I can probably climb a tree faster than I can build a rocket. But only one will get me all the way to the moon. Don't confuse local optima for global ones.

> The sooner those paths are closed for low-effort high-pay jobs, the better, IMO. All this money for no work is going to our heads.

> It's time to learn some real math and science, the era of regurgitating UI templates is over.

You do realize that software development was one of the last social elevators, right?

What you're asking for won't happen, let alone the fact that "real math and science" pay a pittance, there's a reason the pauper mathematician was a common meme.

So you're advocating for properly compensating career paths according to their contributions to society? Tally ho!

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