> LLMs are clearly a massive productivity boost for software developers, and the value of humans manually translating intent into lines of code is rapidly depreciating.

This take is so divorced from reality it's hard to take any of this seriously. The evidence continues to show that LLMs for coding only make you feel more productive, while destroying productivity and eroding your ability to learn.

Re productivity: the METR study is seriously flawed overall, and:

1. if you disaggregate the highly aggregated data, it shows that the slowdown was highly dependent on task type, and tasks that required using documentation or novel tasks were possibly sped up, whereas ones the developers were very experienced with were slowed down, which actually matched the developers' own reports

2. developers were asked to estimate time beforehand per-task, but estimate whether they were sped up or slowed down only once, afterwards, so you're not really measuring the same thing

3. There were no rules about which AI to use, how to use it, or how much to use it, so it's hard to draw a clear conclusion

4. Most participants didn't have much experience with the AI tools they used (just prompting chatbots), and the one that did had a big productivity boost

5. It isn't an RCT.

See [1] for all.

The Anthropic study was using a task far too short to really measure productivity (30 mins), and furthermore the AI users were using chatbots, and spent the vast majority of their time manually retyping AI outputs, and if you ignore that time, AI users were 25% faster[2], so the study was not a good study to judge productivity, and the way people quote it is deeply misleading.

Re learning: the Anthropic study shows that how you use AI massively changes whether you learn and how well you learn; some of the best scoring subjects in that study were ones who had the AI do the work for them, but then explain it afterward[3].

[1]: https://www.fightforthehuman.com/are-developers-slowed-down-... [2]: https://www.seangoedecke.com/how-does-ai-impact-skill-format... [3]: https://www.anthropic.com/research/AI-assistance-coding-skil...

That’s the conclusion you get when you sit in the board of 20 companies where all the CEOs are telling you the same thing but you don’t understand that you are all just selling the same golden shovel to each other. Obviously this can also be backed by their own experiences too: 100% of code is written by AI, because last time they actually wrote code was in 2010.

Your comment is so divorced from reality...