No question. I am far more productive because it lets me get to the answers I need far faster.
I'm more of a iterative solver rather than someone who tries to solve it all into their head the first go. And ai tools are perfect for that kind of approach.
Besides not wanting to give most enjoyable part of the work to LLMs, reviewing LLM-generated code is much more daunting compared to writing the code yourself. So, I only use it for a very narrow and specific 2-3 liners, e.g. some arcane Win32 API calls, where I'd otherwise be browsing some old forums.
This is my reflection as well. I find myself spending MORE time reviewing LLM-generated code and also spending time thinking through LLM generated choices, which, at many times are inefficient or bloated. Keeping the LLM on the right rails takes up more time, even with lengthy agent.md and claude.md files to manage behaviors.
Work less time on work, work more time on my side project, because it can let me use less time to get job done, so I have more time on my side project.
And AI has expanded my boundaries — for example, I used to know nothing about image processing, but now with AI help, I’ve learned and use the technology and even built an initial product prototype using OpenCV, which helped my side project get off the ground successfully.
I'd guess about 20-50% overall productivity, given that only a fraction of my work is writing code.
We have to spend a good amount of time organizing the requirements, as it never comes perfectly from product management, as well alignments and weighting tradeoffs from the architecture.
Reviewing code also became a very daunting and time-consuming task.
I would like to tell about an unexpected benefit I enjoy as a new farther of a 4 month old. I do mostly 'spec-driven-development' meaning most of the time I am iterating and discussing how things currently work, what are the goals, caveats, edgecases, gotchas etc. Only at the very end actual implementation starts. These spec-documents are on a higher abstraction level than raw code and are far easier to hop on and off and the now frequent interuptions are less detrimental.
Working the same, the nature of the work has changed. Less time spent on the minutia of syntax and project scaffolding. More time spent on how the minutia compose into a larger system.
I have a rough time calculating how much more productive AI tooling has made me, because when it does save me time (simple mocking, greenfielding, proof-of-concept), - it saves me a ton of time. Conversely when it fails hard on me I can lose a lot of time and also patience.
The trick is developing the intuition to know when to cut your losses early and instead of continuing to fight the LLM, just implement it yourself.
Depends on the task at hand.. Some tasks like information collection for planning have definitely improved and made easy, but the quality is still not at a level where you can use it without doing an overview.
Overall, it's just the illusion of more productivity or free time. It's just made grunt work easier while making testing/review even more important than before
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I'm more of a iterative solver rather than someone who tries to solve it all into their head the first go. And ai tools are perfect for that kind of approach.
And AI has expanded my boundaries — for example, I used to know nothing about image processing, but now with AI help, I’ve learned and use the technology and even built an initial product prototype using OpenCV, which helped my side project get off the ground successfully.
We have to spend a good amount of time organizing the requirements, as it never comes perfectly from product management, as well alignments and weighting tradeoffs from the architecture.
Reviewing code also became a very daunting and time-consuming task.
The trick is developing the intuition to know when to cut your losses early and instead of continuing to fight the LLM, just implement it yourself.
Overall, it's just the illusion of more productivity or free time. It's just made grunt work easier while making testing/review even more important than before