I'm 100% an AI skeptic. I don't think we're near AGI, well any reasonable definition of it. I don't think we're remotely near a super intelligence or the singularity or whatever. But that doesn't matter. These tools will change how work is done. What matters is what he says here:
> Peeps, let’s do some really simple back-of-envelope math. Trust me, it won’t be difficult math.
> You get the LLM to draft some code for you that’s 80% complete/correct.
> You tweak the last 20% by hand.
> How much of a productivity increase is that? Well jeepers, if you’re only doing 1/5th the work, then you are… punches buttons on calculator watch… five times as productive.
The hard part is the engineering, yes, and now we can actually focus on it. 90% of the work that software engineers do isn't novel. People aren't sitting around coding complicated algorithms that require PhDs. Most of the work is doing pretty boring stuff. And even if LLMs can only write 50% of that you're still going to get a massive boost in productivity.
Of course this isn't always going to be great. Debugging this code is probably going to suck, and even with the best engineering it'll likely accelerate big balls of mud. But it's going to enable a lot of code to get written by a lot more people and it's super exciting.
> Peeps, let’s do some really simple back-of-envelope math. Trust me, it won’t be difficult math.
> You get the LLM to draft some code for you that’s 80% complete/correct.
> You tweak the last 20% by hand.
> How much of a productivity increase is that? Well jeepers, if you’re only doing 1/5th the work, then you are… punches buttons on calculator watch… five times as productive.
The hard part is the engineering, yes, and now we can actually focus on it. 90% of the work that software engineers do isn't novel. People aren't sitting around coding complicated algorithms that require PhDs. Most of the work is doing pretty boring stuff. And even if LLMs can only write 50% of that you're still going to get a massive boost in productivity.
Of course this isn't always going to be great. Debugging this code is probably going to suck, and even with the best engineering it'll likely accelerate big balls of mud. But it's going to enable a lot of code to get written by a lot more people and it's super exciting.