IMO, if you're gaining a significant amount of productivity from LLMs in a technical field, it's because you were either very junior and lacked much of the basic knowledge required of your role, or you performed like you were.
I disagree. Maybe there's savants out there that can write SQL, K8s auto scaling yaml, dockerfiles, React components, backend code, and a dozen other things. But for the rest of us LLMs are helpful for the things we wade into every so often.
It's not miraculous but I feel like it saves me a couple hours a week from not going on wild goose chases. So maybe 5% of my time.
I don't think any engineering org is going to notice 5% more output and layoff 1/20th of their engineers. I think for now most of the time saved is going back to the engineers.
Definitely not the case for coding. I'm a capable senior engineer, and I know many other very experienced senior engineers who are all benefitting immensely from AI, both in the code editor and chat interfaces.
My company just redid our landing page. It would probably have taken a decent developer two weeks to build it out. Using AI to create the initial drafts, it took two days.
IMO, if you haven’t been getting a significant productivity boost from LLMs in a technical field, it’s because you lack the basic brain plasticity to adapt to new tools, or feel so psychologically threatened by change that you act like you do.
I would (similarly insultingly) suggest that if you think this is true, you're spending time doing things more slowly that you could be doing more productively by using contemporary tools.
