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 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 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