The reasons for the big discrepancy between satisfied vs dissatisfied developers using AI for coding
5 points by confusedalex
5 points by confusedalex
Even if you consider yourself an artisan developer there's lots of potential benefit and productivity gains with LLMs. It is possible to use it and never have it generate a single line of code. It could only do debugging, or only write tests, and so on.
To me LLM is simply a tool leveraging your time. You'll get the quality of code according to your own skill. A noob LLM user is going to get 40x faster code of similar quality would write themselves. A more skilled one, will get maybe 3x productivity with all the extra checks and reviews required. I'm sure very careful developer could still find some important wins, but maybe it would be 1.5x. The higher the desired quality, the harder and lower the productivity gains.
Having said that, given that there is more low-skill developers, and AI can make people with no knowledge become one, and then the productivity gains are disproportionately higher for low quality code, as whole software industry is being hit with a deluge of low quality, buggy, insecure software.