I can't see the original post because my browser settings break Twitter (I also haven't liked much of Karpathy's output), but I agree. I call this style of software development 'meeting-based programming,' because that seems to be the mental model that the designers of the tools are pursuing. This probably explains, in part, why c-suite/MBA types are so excited about the tools: meetings are how they think and work.
In a way LLMs/chatbots and 'agents' are just the latest phase of a trend that the internet has been encouraging for decades: the elimination of mental privacy. I don't mean 'privacy' in an everyday sense -- i.e. things I keep to myself and don't share. I mean 'privacy' in a more basic sense: private experience -- sitting by oneself; having a mental space that doesn't include anybody else; simply spending time with one's own thoughts.
The internet encourages us to direct our thoughts and questions outward: look things up; find out what others have said; go to wikipedia; etc. This is, I think, horribly corrosive to the very essence of being a thinking, sentient being. It's also unsurprising, I guess. Humans are social animals. We're going to find ourselves easily seduced by anything that lets us replace private experience with social experience. I suppose it was only a matter of time until someone did this with programming tools, too.
(FYI: you can easily bypass the awful logged out view by replacing x.com with xcancel.com, I use a URL Autoredirector rule to do it automatically in Chromium browsers)
Everything else I’ve used has been over engineered and far less impactful. What I just said above is already what many of us do anyway.
Mass production however won’t stop, it’s barely started literally a couple months ago and it’s the slowest and worst it’ll ever be.
The point is, you can get lots of quality work out of this team if you learn to manage them well.
If that sounds like a “complete and utter nightmare”, then don’t use AI. Hopefully you can keep up without it in the long run.
Are you complaining about code formatters or auto fix linters? What about codegen based on APIs specs? A code agent can do all of those and more. It can do all the boring parts while I get to focus on the interesting bits. It’s great.
Here’s another fantastic use case: have an agent gen the code, think about its prototype, delete, and then rewrite it. I did that on a project with huge success: https://github.com/neurosnap/zmx
It doesn't. The only people I've seen claim such speedups are either not generally fluent in programming or stand to benefit financially from reinforcing this meme.
Of course I wouldn't use an LLM to #yolo some Next.js monstrosity with a flavor-of-the-week ORM and random Tailwind. I have, however, had it build numerous parts of my apps after telling it all about the mise targets and tests and architecture of the code that I came up with up front. In a way it vindicates my approach to software engineering because it's able to use the tools available to it to (reasonably) ensure correctness before it says it's done.
And in any case, you are moving goalposts. OP said he had never seen anyone serious claim that they got productivity gains from AI. When I claim that, you say “well it’s not the next level of abstraction for all SWE”. Obviously - I never claimed that?
Your site is case in point of why LLMs demo well but kind of fall apart in the real world. It's pretty good at fitting lego blocks together based on a ton of work other people have put into React and node or the SSE library you used, etc. But that's not what Karpathy is saying, he's saying "the hottest programming language is english".
That's bonkers. In my experience it can actually slow you down as much as speed you up, and when you try to do more complicated things it falls apart.
This is what the parent said.
> some simple code for your personal website
This is your (reductive) characterization of their work. That's fine, but please keep in mind that that's your inference, not what the parent said.
I think what you're working on has a huge impact on AI's usability. If you're working on things that are simple conceptually and simple to implement, AI will do very well (including handling edge cases). If it's a hard concept, but simple execution, you can use AI to only do the execution and still get a pretty good speed boost, but not transformational. If it's a hard concept and a hard execution (as my latest project has been), then AI is really just not very good at it.
Then figure out which one of the two you are. Years of experience have never equated competence.
Disclaimer because I sound pessimistic: I do use a lot of AI to write code.
I do feel behind on the usage of it.
Just the other day ChatGPT implemented something that would have taken me a week of research to figure out: in 10 minutes. What do you call that speedup? It's a lot more than 10x.
On other days I barely touch AI because I can write easy code faster than I can write prompts for easy code, though the autocomplete definitely helps me type faster.
The "10x" is just a placeholder for averaging over a series of stochastic exponents. It's a way of saying "somewhere between 1 and infinity"
Can you share what exactly this was? Perhaps I don't do anything exciting or challenging, but personally this hasn't happened to me so I find it hard to imagine what this could be.
Instead of AI companies talking about their products, I think the thing to really sell it for me would be an 8 hour long video of an extremely proficient programmer using AI to build something that would have taken them a very long time if they were unassisted.
I'm a half-decent developer with 40 years experience. AI regularly gives me somewhere in the range of 10-100X speed-up of development. I don't benefit from a meme, I do benefit from better code delivered faster.
Sometimes AI is a piece of crap and I work at 0.5X for an hour flogging a dead horse. But those are rarer these days.
Can you share what exactly this was (that got you the 10-100x speedup)? Perhaps I don't do anything exciting or challenging, but personally this hasn't happened to me so I find it hard to imagine what this could be.
Instead of AI companies talking about their products, I think the thing to really sell it for me would be an 8 hour long video of an extremely proficient programmer using AI to build something that would have taken them a very long time if they were unassisted.
> I can vibe code at any scale.
That's the thing - I know what 'vibe coding' is because that's pretty much how I use AI, as an exploratory tool or interactive documentation or a search engine for topics I want surface level information about.
It does not make me a 10x-100x more efficient. It's a toy and a learning tool. It could be replaced or removed and I wouldn't miss it that much.
Clearly I am missing something. I care about quality software, so if it's making someone 100x more productive but their producing the same subpar nonsense they would anyway then I am not interested. Hence I want to see a really proficient programmer use it, be 10x+ more productive, and have a quality product at the end. That's what I want to see demonstrated.
Before LLM programming, this was at least 30-50% of my time spent programming, fixing one config and build issue after another. Now I can spend way more time thinking about more interesting things.
This sounds unbearable. It doesn't sound like software development, it sounds like spending a thousand hours tinkering with your vim config. It reminds me of the insane patchwork of sprawl you often get in DevOps - but now brought to your local machine.
I honestly don't see the upside, or how it's supposed to make any programmer worth their weight in salt 10x better.