I don't think you realize what you are saying here. I agree that it is a large boost but 100x is just too ridiculous to take serious. Do you really believe an engineer can now finish in 20 hours what would have taking them a year before?

As someone who uses ChatGPT4 pretty much nonstop all day (I have a monitor dedicated to it) - it's almost certainly a 10-20x in fields I have no knowledge of (writing in languages I've never used, dealing with OS/Kernel/Network constructs that are unfamiliar to me) - I can knock off in an hour what might have taken me a day or two previously - but I don't think I've ever had a task where I could say that I completed in 1 hour what would have taken 100 hours - though I would love to hear of counterclaims from people who have been able to do so - definitely not saying impossible, just that I haven't had that experience yet.

The idea of the 10x programmer can mean 1) someone who produces a ton of code quickly 2) someone who can solve seemingly-intractable problems 3) someone who’s presence on a team improves everyone’s productivity quite a bit 4) someone who chooses technical decisions that save a ton of time down the line.

(1) is the generally accepted meaning. The others need different words.

Disagree, those are all valid interpretations, and depending on your experience you will have a vastly different understanding.

To me, the first one is the most basic and frankly, most silly definition of a 10x programmer - produces more code? really? Code sucks. Nobody needs more code, people need solutions. Solving a problem with no more code, or understanding it so a _tiny_ change solves all problems? Way better than adding code, actually much harder to synthesize and produce new results. Way more efficient.

Now can you remove things and solve the problem? Realize you can build an even more simple and generic system that solves your problem? Even more amazing.

> Nobody needs more code, people need solutions.

More code per unit of time, not necessarily more code in an absolute sense.

I have always used it to mean “solves problems 10x faster” not “produces 10x code”.

The latter would be a bad thing.

The only benefit Terrence Tao has received is in correcting syntax. He has mentioned that he has gotten (in my opinion better) benefits from talking to existing Lean4 specialists.

I would argue that it only helps in very beginner questions as it is beyond useless on anything more complex.

Like if the answer is not a leetcode/CRUD code sample you can easily find on the internet either way, it can’t do anything useful. Like, my problems mostly constitute things like reasoning about the correctness of a given change in the context of the whole codebase, its threading model, etc. It will at best regurgitate some bullshit like “race conditions can be this and that” here, not helping at all.