New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: By what percentage has AI changed your output as a software engineer?
Ask HN: By what percentage has AI changed your output as a software engineer? 5 by nomilk | 1 comments on Hacker News. Compared to the era before AI coding tools (say, ~2 years ago), if you had to put a number on it, how much has your productivity as a SWE changed? I think about this a lot; am keen to hear what others perceptions are. For me; the short answer: about 2x (i.e. 100% faster than pre LLMs). Long answer: When I thoroughly understand the domain (i.e. business logic and real world problem I'm solving), and am familiar with the tech stack, I'm about ~10x faster for the same or better code quality. When I don't understand the domain, prompts will be ambiguous or inadequate, the LLM will guess, it will do a month's work in a day, but I'll spend the next 3 weeks refactoring and realising how trash the code was, due to how trash the prompt was. All in all, it's probably still faster than pre AI, but can give a demoralising psychological phenomena where yo...