In the past, factories used to shut down when there was a shortage of coal for steam engines or when the electricity supply failed. In the future, programmers will have factory holidays when their AI-coding language model is down.
>programmers
Don't Look Up
Technology changes, people often don't.
Programmers will be around for a longer time than anyone realises because most people don't understand how the magic box works let alone the arcane magics that run on it.
The biggest long-term risk to the AI giant's profitability will be increasingly capable desktop GPU and CPU capability combined with improving performance by local models.
Honestly if it were any faster I would want a feature to slow it down, as I often intervene if it's going in the wrong direction.
Having it integrated into my IDE sounds like a nightmare though. Even the "intellisense" stuff in visual studio is annoying af and I have to turn it off to stop it auto-wrecking my code (eg. adding tonnes of pointless using statement). I dont know how the integrated llm would actually work, but I defo dont want that.
https://openrouter.ai/rankings
It says "Grok Code Fast 1" is ranked first in token usage? That's surprising. Maybe it's just OpenRouter bias or how the LLM is used.
I would have assumed Claude would be #1
SirensOfTitan•2h ago
I still find myself incredibly skeptical LLM use is increasing productivity. Because AI reduces cognitive engagement with tasks, it feels to me like AI increases perceptive productivity but actually decreases it in many cases (and this probably compounds as AI-generated code piles up in a codebase, as there isn't an author who can attach context as to why decisions were made).
https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...
I realize the author qualified his or her statement with "know how to harness it," which feels like a cop-out I'm seeing an awful lot in recent explorations of AI's relationship with productivity. In my mind, like TikTok or online dating, AI is just another product motion toward comfort maximizing over all things, as cognitive engagement is difficult and not always pleasant. In a nutshell, it is another instant gratification product from tech.
That's not to say that I don't use AI, but I use it primarily as search to see what is out there. If I use it for coding at all, I tend to primarily use it for code review. Even when AI does a good job at implementation of a feature, unless I put in the cognitive engagement I typically put in during code review, its code feels alien to me and I feel uncomfortable merging it (and I employ similar levels of cognitive engagement during code reviews as I do while writing software).
breakfastduck•2h ago
I've used LLMs for code gen at work as well as for personal stuff.
At work primarily for quick and dirty internal UIs / tools / CLIs it's been fantastic, but we've not unleashed it on our core codebases. It's worth noting all the stuff we've got out of out are things we'd not normally have the time to work on - so a net positive there.
Outside of work I've built some bespoke software almost entirely generated with human tweaks here and there - again, super useful software for me and some friends to use for planning and managing music events we put on that I'd never normally have the time to build.
So in those ways I see it as massively increasing productivity - to build lower stakes things that would normally just never get done due to lack of time.
add-sub-mul-div•2h ago
"You're doing AI wrong" is the new "you're doing agile wrong" which was the new "you're doing XP wrong".
bitwize•2h ago
pjmlp•2h ago
polotics•2h ago
walleeee•1h ago
I don't think you two are disagreeing.
I have noticed this personally. It's a lot like the fatigue one gets from too long scrolling online. Engagement is shallower but not any less mentally exhausting than reading a book. You end up feeling more exhausted due to the involuntary attention-scattering.
dist-epoch•53m ago
For me is the exact opposite. When not using AI, while coding you notice various things that could be improved, you can think about the architecture and what features you want next.
But AI codes so fast, that it's a real struggle keeping up to it. I feel like I need to focus 10 times harder to be able to think about features/architecture in a way that AI doesn't wait after me most of the time.