I see a lot of people saying things like, if you don't use LLMs for coding then you are slower than your peers who do and you are are obsolete, not worth working with, etc., etc.
I am curious where this train of thought has come from. For decades, there have been
a) some human programmers who worked faster than others
b) other non-LLM programming tools that enabled productivity boosts
While maybe (maybe?) slower programmers aspired to be faster, and maybe (maybe?) their managers wished they were faster, it was generally accepted. You might have someone who codes slowly, or medium, or fast, or superhuman fast. Just so long as they were "fast enough" for your business needs, it wasn't a huge issue. There wasn't a culture of shaming all of the medium-speed programmers into the ground.
And while maybe some programming tools did indeed offer productivity boosts, there really wasn't a culture of demanding all possible boosting tools be used. If you want to use Nano to edit, great, up to you. Emacs? Great. Visual Studio Code? Great. Debuggers? Great. Print statements? Great. Outside of some highbrow programmer ivory towers, there wasn't a widespread insistence that "only these tools shall be used because they let you write code the fastest".
But now it seems that there is demand that LLMs be used to write code as fast as possible as possible.
Why? Why now, is it suddenly important that code be written as fast as possible, and anything less should be mocked and derided?
I think 25% is a low estimate. Using a proper programming editor alone could realistically offer 2x or more productivity over a basic text editor, and there have definitely been programmers who stayed with basic editors.
And I have first hand seen programming teams where there was clearly more than a 25% difference — some could code much, and some could barely code at all.
I think it would be quite fair to say that, between tools and individual skill, there could easily be a 5x speed difference between slower and faster programmers, maybe more. Granted, LLMs are even faster, but I don’t think a 5x potential speed up was a slouch.
What I've seen is that the productive developers are the ones who understand what problem they are solving. They either take the time to think it through or just have an seemingly uncanny ability to see right to the heart of the problem. No false starts, no playing with different implementations. They write the code, it's efficient, and it works.
The slow developers have false starts, have to rework their code as they discover edge cases they didn't think about before, or get all the way through and realize they've solved the wrong problem altogether, or it's too slow at production scale.
I am curious where this train of thought has come from. For decades, there have been
a) some human programmers who worked faster than others
b) other non-LLM programming tools that enabled productivity boosts
While maybe (maybe?) slower programmers aspired to be faster, and maybe (maybe?) their managers wished they were faster, it was generally accepted. You might have someone who codes slowly, or medium, or fast, or superhuman fast. Just so long as they were "fast enough" for your business needs, it wasn't a huge issue. There wasn't a culture of shaming all of the medium-speed programmers into the ground.
And while maybe some programming tools did indeed offer productivity boosts, there really wasn't a culture of demanding all possible boosting tools be used. If you want to use Nano to edit, great, up to you. Emacs? Great. Visual Studio Code? Great. Debuggers? Great. Print statements? Great. Outside of some highbrow programmer ivory towers, there wasn't a widespread insistence that "only these tools shall be used because they let you write code the fastest".
But now it seems that there is demand that LLMs be used to write code as fast as possible as possible.
Why? Why now, is it suddenly important that code be written as fast as possible, and anything less should be mocked and derided?