I can give some recent examples.

- Significantly increased my productivity as a software engineer.

- Using it daily for Chinese-English translation. Significantly better than pre-LLM translation software. Also, great at teaching grammar, nuances, etc.

- General Q&A. Like "Googling" but much faster. This is probably the most common use case for me.

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alpha_squared an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> - Significantly increased my productivity as a software engineer.

This is exactly the point that keeps coming up that folks are struggling to grasp, myself included. How are you measuring this? It certainly makes me feel productive, but I'm not sure I can confidently say it has actually made me more productive. It's made the easy stuff a no-brainer (e.g. boilerplate, simple logic) and the moderate stuff really hard. Never mind the hard stuff. Vetting the code has become a whole other job on its own. The only folks I've found who confidently claim it increases productivity appear to be online (and without evidence), because no one in person is willing to claim that and show it.

	▲	olalonde an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> How are you measuring this? I attempt a programming task with and without LLM assistance. The attempt with LLM assistance is pretty much always completed faster and cleaner. Another example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43991777

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batshit_beaver an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> Significantly increased my productivity as a software engineer.

You’re going to have to define productivity as it applies to software engineering. With LLMs we’ve primarily seen the number of PRs over time being discussed as a proxy for LoC, as well as the speed of bootstrapping a small project. None of these have a known correlation with economic output. They just feel good, to the programmer, their manager, or both.

> Using it daily for Chinese-English translation. Significantly better than pre-LLM translation software. Also, great at teaching grammar, nuances, etc.

Yes dealing with language is the one area LLMs are actually designed for. But what’s the TAM for machine translation?

> General Q&A. Like "Googling" but much faster. This is probably the most common use case for me.

And now you’re missing any kind of traceability for the information that you “learn,” since it all gets spaghettified and then recombined into a pile of plausible slop with no attribution. Where before you had to do slightly more work to find the information you needed, now it’s available faster but you’re at complete mercy of literally 3 American companies plus the CCP for the accuracy of that information. Most people somehow seem happy with this arrangement.

	▲	olalonde an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> You’re going to have to define productivity as it applies to software engineering. I meant it in a colloquial way. I just get more done, faster. > And now you’re missing any kind of traceability for the information Modern LLM assistants provide sources and references. While it can sometimes be just "slightly faster", it can genuinely save hours of research on complex ones. Also the "slightly faster" can add up to hours saved with frequent use.