I mean I wasn’t sitting around unproductively waiting for 30 minute CI runs to finish before LLMs came along, either.

I also like to use LLMs for background work on iterative tasks, but the way some people talk about work in the days before LLMs make me realize how we’re arriving at these claims that LLMs make us 10X more productive. If it took someone all day to do a few minutes of active work then I could see how LLMs would feel like a 10X or 50X productivity unlocker simply by not shutting down and doing nothing at the first sign of a pause.

Count yourself as one of the lucky few that can pay a 0 minute context switching price to switch between whatever other productive work you were doing and debugging CI. Most people I speak to remark that continually switching between unrelated tasks significantly diminishes their productivity.