Yes, exactly.

Burning down the rainforests so I don’t have to wait for my fingers.

The environmental impact of running prompts through (most) of these models is massively over-stated.

(I say "most" because GPT-4.5 is 1000x the price of GPT-4o-mini, which implies to me that it burns a whole lot more energy.)

If you do a basic query to GPT-4o every ten seconds it uses a blistering... hundred watts or so. More for long inputs, less when you're not using it that rapidly.

This is honestly really unimpressive

Typing speed is not usually the constraint for programming, for a programmer that knows what they are doing

Creating the solution is the hard work, typing it out is just a small portion of it

I know. That's why I've consistently said that LLMs give me a 2-5x productivity boost on the portion of my job which involves typing code into a computer... which is only about 10% of what I do. (One recent example: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/10/software-misadventures... )

(I get boosts from LLMs to a bunch of activities too, like researching and planning, but those are less obvious than the coding acceleration.)

> That's why I've consistently said that LLMs give me a 2-5x productivity boost on the portion of my job which involves typing code into a computer... which is only about 10% of what I do

This explains it then. You aren't a software developer

You get a productivity boost from LLMs when writing code because it's not something you actually do very much

That makes sense

I write code for probably between 50-80% of any given week, which is pretty typical for any software dev I've ever worked with at any company I've ever worked at

So we're not really the same. It's no wonder LLMs help you, you code so little that you're constantly rusty

I'm a software developer: https://github.com/simonw

I very much doubt you spend 80% of your working time actively typing code into a computer.

My other activities include:

- Researching code. This is a LOT of my time - reading my own code, reading other code, reading through documentation, searching for useful libraries to use, evaluating if those libraries are any good.

- Exploratory coding in things like Jupyter notebooks, Firefox developer tools etc. I guess you could call this "coding time", but I don't consider it part of that 10% I mentioned earlier.

- Talking to people about the code I'm about to write (or the code I've just written).

- Filing issues, or updating issues with comments.

- Writing documentation for my code.

- Straight up thinking about code. I do a lot of that while walking the dog.

- Staying up-to-date on what's new in my industry.

- Arguing with people about whether or not LLMs are useful on Hacker News.

"typing code is a small portion of programming"

"I agree, only 10% of what I do is typing code"

"that explains it, you aren't a software developer"

What the hell?

You should check out Simon’s wikipedia and github pages, when you have time between your coding sprints.