it's really cool how in the past measuring developer productivity was incredibly difficult, but now its become easy if someone's making a point about LLMs
you're a lot more skilled than I am if you're able to know the abstractions and patterns you want while only have a weak grasp on the actual code. For me the abstractions emerge as I understand what I'm actually working with
If software development were getting easier, first thing I'd expect to see would be a strong downward trend in salaries. Why pay a high mid+ dev rate when a junior+LLM can do the same?
That's yet to happen. 90% of software dev skills are still relevant - AI is, for now, just a productivity boost.
Now view this in contrast with what happened to Aaron Swartz
> According to state and federal authorities, Swartz used JSTOR, a digital repository,[79] to download a large number[note 2] of academic journal articles through MIT's computer network over the course of a few weeks
> ...federal prosecutors filed a superseding indictment adding nine more felony counts, increasing Swartz's maximum criminal exposure to 50 years of imprisonment
> ...On the evening of January 11, 2013, Swartz's girlfriend, Stinebrickner-Kauffman, found him dead in his Brooklyn apartment.[80][116][117] A spokesperson for New York's Medical Examiner reported that he had hanged himself
I mean people are using Claude Code because of their underlying LLM - they'll put up with Claude Code. There's no other real option to get Opus at a reasonably affordable price without CC.
Most people would choose to swim a lap through a pool of pee to get a billion dollars at the end. The pool of pee itself wasn't the once in a lifetime opportunity (for most).
They succeeded in spite of their tech choices. Their model outshone it, which is an extremely rare thing to happen and not something they could've counted on. In any other timeline they could've/would've been hurt by their choices.
It's like "why did you go all in on buying scamcoin 3.0 as your investment strategy?" -- "I 5xed my money! End of story! It was fine!"
Outside of really bad luck I've never seen a case where someone was in a situation of working hard + making reasonably okay decisions + struggling, and that's purely due to there being avenues available where you can be rewarded well for your effort if you're of average+ intelligence.
Only solution I can think of is higher taxes for the rich used to provide universal income. I'm not sure how the realities of that would play out, though.
Anything based on a free market just ends up in.. this.