Hmmm, I think I disagree with this.
I estimate that I'm now spending about 10 to 30 hours less time a week in the mechanical parts of writing and refactoring code, researching how to plumb components together, and doing "figure out how to do unfamiliar thing" research.
All of those hours are time that can now be spent doing "careful consideration" (or just being with my family or at the gym or reading a book, which is all cognitively valuable as well).
Now, I suppose I agree that if timelines accelerate ahead of that amount of regained time, then I'm net worse off, but that's not the current situation at the moment, in my experience.
Maybe we do different things. Not that you are wrong about spending less time on things that you don't care about, but at the same time all that mechanical things helps you build a really good mental model of your product from high level design to individual classes. If I already have a good mental model of that I can direct AI to make really good changes fast, if I don't I will get things done ... but it does end up with less than ideal changes that compounds over time.
What you said: "figure out how to do unfamiliar thing" -- is correct, and will get things done, but overall quality, maintainability or understanding how individual pieces work...that's what you don't get. One can argue who care about all that as AI can take care of that or already can. I don't think its true today at-least.
I guess I just don't really agree that doing the tedious mechanical things is all that helpful for building the necessary mental model. I mean, I do think it was useful (indeed, necessary) for me to actually type out very similar lines of code over and over again when I was building up the programming skillset, but I really think the marginal value of that is just very low for me at this point. I worry a lot about how we're going to train the next generation of people without there being any incentive to do this part of the process! But for me, I already did that part.
What I find is actually necessary for me to have a mental model of the system is not typing out the definitions of the classes and such, but rather operating and debugging the system. I really do need to try to do things, and dig into logs, and figure out what's going on when something is off. And pretty much always ends up requiring reading and understanding a bunch of the implementation. But whether I personally typed out that implementation, or one of my colleagues, or an AI, is less important.
I mean, I already had to be able to build a mental model of a system that I didn't fully implement myself! I essentially never work on anything that I have developed in its entirety on my own.
Yeah! I mean, who needs to LEARN how to to these things properly when you can just let an autocorrect on steroids hallucinate the closest thing to “barely working”. Right?
10 to 30 hours saved on not learning new things! Hurray!
I genuinely don't understand what you're talking about with this comment. Learn how to do what things properly? I've been writing software for two decades... I'm not primarily in a learning phase, I'm in a doing phase. I'll take advantage of tools that save me time and energy in my work (for the right price). Why wouldn't I?
What do you mean by "barely working"? I can now put more iterations into getting things working better, more quickly, with less effort. That seems good to me.
10 to 30 hours a week is 25% to 75% of my time working. Seems like a pretty good trade?
I do understand that the calculation is different for people who are new to this. And I worry a lot about how people will build their skills and expertise when there is no incentive to put in all the tedious legwork. But that just isn't the phase of my career that I'm in...
There is simply no chance that LLMs are saving you 30 hours of work a week, especially if they're doing something where you'd have to do the research yourself. Either you're just simply wrong, or you went from understanding the code you were writing to skimming whatever the magic box spits out and either merging it outright or pawning off the effort of review on someone else.
My one question for you: What’s your level of editor fluency? Because I would really like to know if there’s a correlation between claiming these kind of time savings and not using advanced features in your editor.
My time is spent more on editing code than writing new lines. Because code is so repetitive, I mostly do copy-pasting, using the completion and the snippets engine, reorganize code. If I need a new module, I just copy what’s most similar, remove everything and add the new parts. That means I only write 20 lines of that 200 lines diff.
Also my editor (emacs) is my hub where I launch builds and tests, where I commit code, where I track todo and jot notes. Everything accessible with a short sequence of keys. Once you have a setup like this, it’s flow state for every task. Using LLM tools is painful, like being in a cubicle reading reports when you could be mentally skiing on code.