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points by Timwi 4 days ago | 0 comments
> At this point it's abundantly clear that the productivity gain is real and massive.

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.

[–] rolisz 4 days ago
I wrote several tools for myself that have a huge impact on my personal life (a calorie/food tracker, a very custom Todo app that works by combining several strategies that I learned over the years, a personal knowledge base that surfaces information better for me). But it's a personal app, I'm not gonna make it public
[–] dimitrios1 4 days ago
Congrats? I used to write one of these every so often in a couple hours when I was learning a new programming language.

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.

[–] rolisz 4 days ago
I mean in total it's about 300k lines of code (across all the tools I built for myself). It's a poor metric, but it's not something you put together in a couple of hours.

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.

[–] spence-s 4 days ago
There is still like 20 free versions of these on the market (pre-ai) I am sure yours is barely different. You just wasted time and tokens and pat yourself on the back for it and somehow feel this can be applied generally as "productivity" and "massive imporvements in software"
[–] rozularen 4 days ago
sure dimitrios, you were producing a fully fledged UI + backend in a couple of hours while also learning a new language.

you also were doing another 2 or 3 tasks in parallel while implementing them - just like with AI

sure, dimitrios :)

[–] dimitrios1 4 days ago
No not fully fledged and feature complete. But a baseline POC with the core functionality? Isn’t every react tutorial these days a Todo app?

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”

[–] gamblor956 3 days ago
It used to be that most programmers were good enough to reimplement a basic database app in a few hours as a way of learning a new language or framework.

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.

[–] kragen 4 days ago
I did that when I learned React, but it took me all night, not a couple of hours.
[–] podocarp 2 days ago
Yes, now you just produce the app and not learn anything. That's how you do it in 4 hours and parallel.
[–] hobo123 4 days ago
Maybe because a year ago the productivity wasn't yet massive, and adoption was still niche.

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).

[–] user43928 4 days ago
Just as one reference point, for my mobile app, it took me 6 months of approximately full time workload to get it ready to submit the initial release.

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.