No, it's rate at which you can solve problems, and weaker models waste your time because they don't solve problems at the same speed.

No, its the number of debug cycles you need to solve said problems. That's the major attribute that controls dev time. And models require far more than I need. You are paying money to take longer and produce worse code. If its different for you, that's a you problem.

amazing how often is this repeated on here are some sort of a gospel SWEs pass down to one another to continue this charade. I have worked in this industry for 30+ years on countless projects, last decade+ as consultant - at every single project (every single one) programming time was the limiting factor. there is a whole industry inside our industry dealing with “processes” and “how to estimate” (apparently we are incapable of doing that) and whatnot, all because the actual programming time is always a limiting factor and there isn’t an even close 2nd

That's just not my experience. Making the software in the first place is never even the cost center.

What counts as programming time ? Writing ? Reviewing ? Compiling ? Debugging ? It also depends the industry. From idea to production, the limiting factor is not always writing the code, and in my experience (15years in fintech) it almost has never been. Discussion, alignment, compilation, heavy testing pipelines, shipping, all of this on a 30million line monorepo. On a greenfield 10k line repo, yes, AI really shines. In other cases, it’s currently just a helper on very specific narrow tasks, that is not always programming.

Agreed, it's very strange. I'm sure there are many projects that are like they describe, but it's certainly not all of them. I have worked as a game dev for over 20 years, and probably 75% of that time my team and I have been coding. AI has been an incredible game changer for me over the past 6 months or so (I was using it quite a bit before then, but the capability became much higher lately). I actually have some free time in my days now while still hitting milestone dates, instead of endless crunching.