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LLM Productivity Claims Skepticism

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Skepticism toward massive LLM productivity claims remains high, with many commenters dismissing narratives of radical efficiency as a "complete fantasy" potentially fueled by industry marketing rather than genuine technological revolution. Critics point out that over-reliance on AI often results in "vibe coding"—a process that yields unmaintainable, unverified code and fundamentally distances developers from the rigorous logic and inspection required in traditional programming. This doubt is further compounded by a lack of concrete evidence for extreme speed increases and a concern that engineers are prematurely resigning their labor power to tools that currently produce more technical debt than actual value. Ultimately, the consensus suggests that while LLMs offer some "edutainment" value, they are far from providing the transformative, high-quality output necessary to replace professional human engineering.

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This is a complete fantasy. If LLM's got to this point of sophistication there would be a total revolution in almost every industry. Society would be radically different. Since LLM's are nowhere near this, I'm not so sure we even have Pandora's box, let alone opened it.
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Glad someone is rational. I believe this new wave of zeal is being somewhat driven by an Anthropic astroturfing campaign. This AI fear wave has outed that many people have not even the most basic grasp of economics, or the ability to carry a thought to its natural conclusion. For example, I'll often see people espousing: "there will be no work left, better get rich now or you're screwed!". What's the point in getting rich if there will be no work left? Money is merely a means to an end; in this world with no work everyone will have the ends (goods and services) for free, or else goods and services will still have value and therefore jobs will still exist. Another equally silly argument "only software will be completely replaced because it is verifiable". I've never seen completely verifiable software, but let's presume it exists! If software engineering can be replaced (or some large part of it) I will simply say to my LLM "please make me a piece of software that replaces my accountant/lawyer/...", for that matter I could just as equally say "please make me manufacturing software for a perfect humanoid robot and a plumber/bricklayer/electrician protocol". LLMs cannot do this? Then software engineers will move to solving these problems. If LLMs can do it, then the entire economy will be meaningless and Dario/Sam/Elon/etc... will be no richer than you or I. But, as you say, LLMs are not close to being able to do any of this (and yes... I use Claude Code)
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It's utterly unreal to me to hear so little discussion about labor organization within software during these nascent moments of LLM deployment. Software engineers seem totally resigned toward reduced salary and employment instead of just organizing labor while still in control of the development of these systems. I really don't get it -- is it that people think these technologies will be so transformative that it is most moral to race toward them? I don't see much evidence of that, it's just future promises (especially commensurate with the benefit / cost ratio). When I do use this tech it's usually edutainment kind of curiosity about some subject matter I don't have enough interest in to dive into--it's useful and compelling but also not really necessary. In fact, I don't really think the tech right now is at all transformative, and that a lot of folks are unable to actually gauge their productivity accurately when using these tools; however, I do not believe that the technology will stay that way, and it will inevitably start displacing people or degrading labor conditions within the only economically healthy remaining tranche of people in America: the white collar worker.
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What tool do you use, which languages? Could you give us an example of something you’ve built and how you did it 25 times faster?
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Would you describe this product as a whole application suite (blogging, calendar, commerce) plus its own backend infrastructure that is capable of serving these apps to the public internet and functioning offline via ad-hoc wireless peer-to-peer, with a cryptographic layer providing identity, security and censorship resistance, and that runs on phone, laptop or raspberry pi? Quite ambitious. Is this an LLM hallucinating? taking a break from coding? or leaking your personal desktop session? https://github.com/geograms/geogram/blob/main/.cli_history
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I'm surprised to see people getting value from "web sandbox"-type setups, where you don't actually have access to the source code. Are folks really _that_ confident in LLMs as to entirely give up the ability to inspect the source code, or to interact with a running local instance of the service? Certainly that would be the ideal, but I'm surprised that confidence is currently running that high.
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That sounds nice, but what happens when there's something Claude messes up, doesn't know how to do something, or when you have to review the thousand lines it added to your project ? Unless it's a totally vibe coded side project without any tests or quality control of some sort. I'm just curious what you can build with this setup. It just seems to be the way to create a mountain of sloppy, unmaintainable code.
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> Now I code from my phone. Except that you are doing anything else but coding here. Coding involves writing code, which isn't actually done by the author here.