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469 points samuelstros | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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diego_sandoval ◴[] No.44998676[source]
It shocks me when people say that LLMs don't make them more productive, because my experience has been the complete opposite, especially with Claude Code.

Either I'm worse than then at programming, to the point that I find an LLM useful and they don't, or they don't know how to use LLMs for coding.

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lambda ◴[] No.44998918[source]
It can be more than one reason.

First of all, keep in mind that research has shown that people generally overestimate the productivity gains of LLM coding assistance. Even when using a coding assistant makes them less productive, they feel like they are more productive.

Second, yeah, experience matters, both with programming and LLM coding assistants. The better you are, the less helpful the coding assistant will be, it can take less work to just write what you want than convince an LLM to do it.

Third, some people are more sensitive to the kind of errors or style that LLMs tend to use. I frequently can't stand the output of LLMs, even if it technically works; it doesn't live to to my personal standards.

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1. pton_xd ◴[] No.44998967[source]
> Third, some people are more sensitive to the kind of errors or style that LLMs tend to use. I frequently can't stand the output of LLMs, even if it technically works; it doesn't live to to my personal standards.

I've noticed the stronger my opinions are about how code should be written or structured, the less productive LLMs feel to me. Then I'm just fighting them at every step to do things "my way."

If I don't really have an opinion about what's going on, LLMs churning out hundreds of lines of mostly-working code is a huge boon. After all, I'd rather not spend the energy thinking through code I don't care about.