I’ve definitely seen humans do stuff in an hour that takes others days to do. In fact, I see it all the time. And sometimes, I know people who have skills to do stuff very quickly but they choose not to because they’d rather procrastinate and not get pressured to pick up even more work.

And some people waste even more time writing stuff from scratch when libraries exist for whatever they’re trying to do, which could get them up and running quickly.

So really I don’t think these bold claims of LLMs being so much faster than humans hit as hard as some people think they do.

And here’s the thing: unless you’re using the time you save to fill yourself up with even more work, you’re not really making productivity gains, you’re just using an LLM to acquire more free time on the company dime.

1. LLM fanboy: "LLMs are awesome, they can do x, y, and z really well."

2. LLM skeptic: "OK, but I tried them and found them wanting for doing x, y, and z"

3. LLM fanboy: "You're doing it wrong. Do it this way ..."

4. The LLM skeptic goes to try it that way, still finds it unsatisfactory. A few months pass....

5. LLM fanboy: "Hey, have you tried model a.b.c-new? The problems with doing x, y, and z have now been fixed" (implicitly now agrees that the original complaints were valid)

6. LLM skeptic: "What the heck, I though you denied there were problems with LLMs doing x, y, and z? And I still have problems getting them to do it well"

7. Goto 3