But isn't this only fine as long someone who knows what they are doing has oversight and can fix issues when they arise and Claude gets stuck?
Once we all forget how to write SUM(A:A), will we just invent a new kind of spreadsheet once Claude gets stuck?
Or in other words; what's the end game here? LLMs clearly cannot be left alone to do anything properly, so what's the end game of making people not learn anything anymore?
Well the end game with AI is AGI of course. But realistically the best case scenario with LLM’s is having fewer people with the required knowledge, leveraging LLM’s to massively enhance productivity.
We’re already there to some degree. It is hard to put a number on my productivity gain, but as a small business owner with a growing software company it’s clear to me already that I can reduce developer hiring going forward.
When I read the skeptics I just have to conclude that they’re either poor at context building and/or work on messy, inconsistent and poorly documented projects.
My sense is that many weaker developers who can’t learn these tools simply won’t compete in the new environment. Those who can build well designed and documented projects with deep context easy for LLM’s to digest will thrive.
I assume all of this applies to spreadsheets.
Why isn't there a single study that would back up your observations? The only study with a representative experimental design that I know about is the METR study and it showed the opposite. Every study citing significant productivity improvements that I've seen is either:
- relying on self-assessments from developers about how much time they think they saved, or
- using useless metrics like lines of code produced or PRs opened, or
- timing developers on toy programming assignments like implementing a basic HTTP server that aren't representative of the real world.
Why is it that any time I ask people to provide examples of high quality software projects that were predominantly LLM-generated (with video evidence to document the process and allow us to judge the velocity), nobody ever answers the call? Would you like to change that?
My sense is that weaker developers and especially weaker leaders are easily impressed and fascinated by substandard results :)
Everything Claude does is reviewed by me, nothing enters the code base that doesn’t meet the standard we’ve always kept. Perhaps I’m sub standard and weak but my software is stable, my customers are happy, and I’m delivering value to them quicker than I was previously.
I don’t know how you could effectively study such a thing, that avenue seems like a dead end. The truth will become obvious in time.