I must comprehend code at the abstraction level I am working at. If I write Python, I am responsible for understanding the Python code. If I write Assembly, I must understand the Assembly.

The difference is that Compilers are deterministic with formal specs. I can trust their translation. LLMs are probabilistic generators with no guarantees. When an LLM generates Python code, that becomes my Python code that I must fully comprehend, because I am shipping it.

That is why productivity is capped at review speed, you can't ship what you don't understand, regardless of who or what wrote it.

Even if LLMs worked perfectly without hallucinations (they don't and might never), a conscientious developer must still comprehend every line before shipping it. You can't review and understand code 10x faster just because an LLM generated it.

In fact, reviewing generated code often takes longer because you're reverse-engineering implicit assumptions rather than implementing explicit intentions.

The "10x productivity" narrative only works if you either:

- Are not actually reviewing the output properly

or

- Are working on trivial code where correctness doesn't matter.

Real software engineering, where bugs have consequences, remains bottlenecked by human cognitive bandwidth, not code generation speed. LLMs shifted the work from writing to reviewing, and that's often a net negative for productivity.

I see the claims being levied against LLMs, but in the generative media world these models are nothing short of revolutionary.

In addition to being an engineer, I'm also a filmmaker. This tech has so many orders of magnitude changes to the production cycle:

- Films can be made 5,000x cheaper (a $100M Disney film will be matched by small studios on budgets of $20,000.)

- Films can be made 5x faster (end-to-end, not accounting for human labor hour savings. A 15 month production could feasibly be done in 3 months.)

- Films can be made with 100x fewer people. (Studios of the future will be 1-20 people.)

Disney and Netflix are going to be facing a ton of disruptive pressure. It'll be interesting to see how they navigate.

Advertising and marketing? We've already seen ads on TV that were made over a weekend [1] for a few thousand dollars. I've talked to customers that are bidding $30k for pharmaceutical ad spots they used to bid $300k for. And the cost reductions are just beginning.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2025/06/23/nx-s1-5432712/ai-video-ad-kal...

> In 2002, Google offered to sell again for $1 billion. Yahoo hesitated and Google raised its price to $3 billion. Yahoo declined at the higher price. Google went on to become a trillion dollar company.

> Yahoo attempted to acquire Facebook for $1 billion in 2006, but Mark Zuckerberg turned down the offer. Had Yahoo increased its offer by just $100 million, Facebook’s board would have forced Zuckerberg to take it. Facebook also became a trillion dollar company.

In inclined to believe that neither would have become trillion dollar companies if they had been acquired by Yahoo.