Initial compilation and incremental compilation are very different.
Large Rust projects are broken up into modules. If you change one module you don’t have recompile the whole project.
Remember we’re talking about compensation time versus LLM turns in this thread. Even a 10 second incremental compile is orders of magnitude faster than an LLM turn.
> Remember we’re talking about compensation time versus LLM turns in this thread. Even a 10 second incremental compile is orders of magnitude faster than an LLM turn.
This entirely depends on (a) what a step/prompt/turn is trying to do and (b) tooling and rate limiting and various other aspects of your model and/or access to it.
If you have high rate limits and aren't using an Opus-or-larger sized model you can get a LOT of changes done in 10 seconds.
And this is especially true for "oh not all the tests are passing yet, let me change..." iterations where the change attempts are often low-single-digit seconds.