Oh? Where is it? Why am I not seeing it as a user if it's abundantly clear? In none of the software I've used frequently in the last year have I seen any of those “real and massive” improvements. Not saying they don't improve at all, but the rate hasn't increased since the advent of LLMs.
I'm still waiting for that shiny new era of software productivity to impact any actual users.
Don’t take this as directed at you because I don’t know your background, but I’m starting to wonder if many who called themselves engineers here that have similar takes to this ever knew how to actually program to begin with.
you also were doing another 2 or 3 tasks in parallel while implementing them - just like with AI
sure, dimitrios :)
Anyways my point wasn’t to try and make myself out to be some John Henry (I could have done without the snarky "congrats", apologies). It’s that drowned out in the noise of AI based development, we forget that there are amazing software engineers out there (I’m not placing myself in this category) that were incredibly productive in a short amount of time. Quite some time ago, I watched, in awe, a live stream of two prominent Go developers completely rewrite the HTTP package, for example. And this was over the course of a night.
We need a new metric to gauge AI usefulness other than “I built this thing quickly”
The pool of programmers today is many times larger and less trained and so correspondingly most of today's programmers simply aren't very good and are astounded by feats that were once basic learning tasks.
Oh, and specifically the food logging part: no, you didn't do that in a couple of hours years ago. Taking pictures of food and having estimates grounded in your personal "recipe" library was a major research project until vLLMs came out.
Both of those things have changed a lot, and I think a year from now you will definitely see changes (maybe not massive, but still).
In the beginning I was using GPT-5.4 in April.
I can't speak to what other devs are building, and there's certainly no lack of people pushing out slop made in a weekend.
Companies and teams with code review are not adapting at the same speed.
I figure it will take a few additional months for the benefits to become more noticeable to end users.
As someone working on the frontier, so to say, I believe I have a better picture.