> Humans and LLMs both share a fundamental limitation. Humans have a working memory, and LLMs have a context limit.
But there’s a more important difference: I can’t spin up 20 decent human programmers from my terminal.
The argument that "code was never the bottleneck" is genuinely appealing, but it hasn’t matched my experience at all. I’m getting through dramatically more work now. This is true for my colleagues too.
My non-technical niece recently built a pretty solid niche app with AI tools. That would have been inconceivable a few years ago.
I guess that what people debate on here is what “decent” mean. From my experience, these llms spit out dog shit code, so 20 agents equal 20x more dog shit.
1. Assume you're to work on product/feature X.
2. If God were to descend and give you a very good, reality-tested spec:
3. Would you be done faster? Of course, because as every AI doomer says, writing code was never the bottleneck!!1!
4. So the only bottleneck is getting to the spec.
5. Guess what AI can help you with as well, because you can iterate out multiple versions with little mental effort and no emotional sunk cost investment?
ergo coding is a solved problem