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Comment by svachalek | Hacker News Reader

I think you're either imagining the circle too small or overestimating how often humans step outside it. The typical programming job involves lots and lots of work, and yet none of it creating wholly original computer science. Current LLMs can customize well known UI/IO/CRUD/REST patterns with little difficulty, and these make up the vast majority of commercial software development.

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I agree humans only rarely step outside the circle, but I do have this intuition that some people sometimes do, whereas LLMs never do. This distinction seems important over long time horizons when thinking about LLM vs human work.

But I can't quite articulate why I believe LLMs never step outside the circle, because they are seeded with some random noise via temperature. I could just be wrong.

Frameworks and low code systems have been able to do that for years. The reason they haven’t replaced programmers is that every system eventually becomes a special unique snowflake as long as it has time and users.

I’m getting maybe a 10-20% productivity boost using AI on mature codebases. Nice but not life changing.

a 20% boost is huge, for 3 years since chatgpt. even if it stopped there, that's 20% fewer people that need to be in your role, which is at least tens of thousands of jobs

If devs produce 20% more, won't companies hire more since the gain/loss equation is starting to tilt their way even more? I find it odd that people think productivity increases lead to layoffs.

Assuming there’s fixed demand. If companies can get 20% more software for the same price then there is still a lot of automation to do

That’s far less than the productivity boost I got by building some internal tooling with phoenix liveview instead of react.

10-20% productivity posts have been happening regularly over the course of my career. They are normally either squandered by inefficient processes or we start building more complex systems.

When Rails was released, for certain types of projects, you could move 3 or 4x faster almost overnight.

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