Naur's "Programming as Theory Building" and LLMs replacing human programmers

First, I think it's fair to say that today, an LLM cannot replace a programmer fully.

However, I have two counters:

- First, the rational argument right now is that one person and money spent toward LLMs can replace three - or more - programmers total. This is the argument with a three year bound. The current technology will improve and developers will learn how to use it to its potential.

- Second, the optimistic argument is that a combination of the LLM model with larger context windows and other supporting technology around it will allow it to emulate a theory of mind that is similar to the average programmer. Consider Go or Chess - we didn't think computers had the theory of mind to be better than a human, but it found other ways. For humans, Naur's advice stands. We cannot assume that this is true if there are tools with different strengths and weaknesses than humans.

If you forced me to put a number on how much more productive having copilot makes me I think I would say < 5%, so I'm struggling to see how anyone can just assert that "the rational argument right now" is that I can be 200% more productive.

Maybe as a senior dev working on a large complex established project I don't benefit from LLMs as much as others because as I and the project mature.. productivity becomes less and less correlated with lines of code, and more about the ability to comprehend the bigger picture and how different components interact... things that even LLMs with bigger context aren't good at.

> If you forced me to put a number on how much more productive having copilot makes me I think I would say < 5%, so I'm struggling to see how anyone can just assert that "the rational argument right now" is that I can be 200% more productive.

If you're thinking about Copilot, you're simply not talking about the same thing that most people who claim a 200% speedup are talking about. They're talking about either using chat-oriented workflows, where you're asking Claude or similar to wholesale generate code, often using an IDE like Cursor. Or even possibly talking about Coding Agents like Claude Code, which can be even more productive.

You might still be right! They might still be wrong! But your talking about Copilot makes it seem like you're nowhere near the cutting edge use of AI, so you don't have a well-formed opinion about it.

(Personally, I'm not 200% productive with Coding Agents, for various reasons, but given the number of people I admire who are, I believe this is something that will change, and soon.)

> But your talking about Copilot makes it seem like you're nowhere near the cutting edge use of AI, so you don't have a well-formed opinion about it

You can use Claude, Gemini, etc through Copilot and you can use the agent mode. Maybe you do or maybe you don’t have a well formed opinion of the parent’s workflow.