That wasn't the argument at all.

If I wrote a card game in 3 months, then cloned the repository and used that as a base to implement a different card game, it would be significantly faster with or without LLMs.

The argument is that it's not really an apples-to-apples comparison. "I wrote a game in 3 months and then used an LLM in 3 days to fork it and make some changes" is not the same thing as "I spent 3 months doing something that I could do in 3 days with LLMs".

I believe LLM-driven development is powerful (though I hate seeing "10x" everywhere, and have hated it long before LLM coding was big, when it was talking about supposedly superhuman coders), but this is not a good comparison, and the argument is sound.

Exactly true. I've had the experience of implementing a programming language in two different languages. The first time it took half a year. The second time it was done in a month, because it was really only a matter of translating all of the code from one c-style imperative language to another, and swapping out the important library code and function calls.

Maybe AI can take that process from a month down to 3 days, and that's great and all, a 10x improvement! But you don't go from 6 months to 3 days without doing the 6 months first.