Would it have actually taken you 3x longer?

I am surprising myself these days with how fast I'm being using AI as a glorified Stack Overflow.

We are also having studies and posts come out that when actually tried side-by-side, the AI writes the coding route is slower, though the developer percieves it as faster.

I am not the biggest fan of LLMs but I have to admit that, as long as you understand what the technology is and how it works, it is a very powerful tool.

I think the mixed reports on utility have a lot to do with the very different ways the tool is used and how much 'magic' the end-user expects versus how much the end-user expects to guide the tool to do the work.

To get the best out of it, you do have to provide significant amount of scaffolding (though it can help with that too). If you're just pointing it at a codebase and expecting it to figure it out, you're going to have mixed results at best. If you guide it well, it can save a significant amount of manual effort and time.

I can imagine it often being the case that if you measure a concise moderately difficult task over half a day or a few days, coding by hand might be faster.

But I think, and this is just conjecture, that if you measure over a longer timespan, the ai assisted route will be consistently faster.

And for me, this is down to momentum and stamina. Paired with the ai, I’m much more forward looking, always anticipating the next architectural challenge and filling in upcoming knowledge and resource gaps. Without the ai, I would be expending much more energy on managing people and writing code myself. I would be much more stop-and-start as I pause, take stock, deal with human and team issues, and rebuild my capacity for difficult abstract thinking.

Paired with a good ai agent and if I consistently avoid the well known pitfalls of said agent, development feels like it has the pace of cross country skiing, a long pleasant steady and satisfying burn.

The truth of it is that when I code with an LLM I scope the work up to include parts that would be a stretch for me to implement. I know what I want them to do, I know where I could find the info to write the code, but the LLM can just spit it out and if it's validate-able, then great, on to the next.

If I were to attack the same system myself without any LLM assist, I'd make a lot of choices to optimize for my speed and knowledge base. The code would end up much simpler. For something that would be handed off to another person (including future me) that can be a win. But if the system is self contained then going bigger and fancier in that moment can be a win. It all depends on the exact goals.

All in all, there's a lot of nuance to this stuff and it's probably not really replacing anyone except people who A) aren't that skilled to start with and B) spend more time yelling about how bad AI is than actually digging in and trying stuff.

> the AI writes the coding route is slower, though the developer percieves it as faster.

I have this pattern while driving.

Using the main roads, when there is little to no traffic, the commute is objectively, measurably the fastest.

However, during peak hours, I find myself in traffic jams, so I divert to squiggly country roads which are both slower and longer, but at least I’m moving all the time.

The thing is, when I did have to take the main road during the peak traffic, the difference between it and squiggly country roads was like two to three minutes at worst, and not half an hour like I was afraid it would be. Sure, ten minutes crawling or standing felt like an hour.

Maybe coding with LLMs makes you think you are doing something productive the whole time, but the actual output is little different from the old way? But hey, at least it’s not like you’re twiddling your thumbs for hours, and the bossware measuring your productivity by your keyboard and mouse activity is happy!