You said you couldn't imagine a conspiracy and I was responding to that. As far as zero demonstration, simonw has a bunch of detailed examples at:https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai-assisted-programming/ or maybe https://simonwillison.net/tags/claude-artifacts/, but the proof is in the pudding, as they say, so setting aside some time and $20 to install Aider and get it working w/ Claude, and then building a web app is the best way to experience either the second coming, or an overhyped let down. (or somewhere in the middle.)

Still, I don't think it's a hypothesis that most are operating under, but a lived experience that either it works for them or it does not. Just the other day I used ChatGPT to write me a program to split a file into chunks along a delimiter. Something I could absolutely do, in at least a half-dozen languages, but writing that program myself would have distracted me from the actual task at hand, so I had the LLM do it. It's a trivial script, but the point is I didn't have to break my concentration on the other task to get that done. Again, I absolutely could have done it myself, but that would have been a total distraction. https://chatgpt.com/share/67655615-cc44-8009-88c3-5a241d083a...

On a side project I'm working on, I said "now add a button to reset the camera view" (literally, aider can take voice input). we're not quite at the scene from star trek where scottie talks into the mac to try and make transparnet aluminum, but we're not that far off! The LLM went and added the button, wired it into a function call that called into the rendering engine and reset the view. Again, I very much could have done that myself, but it would have taken me longer just to flip through the files involved and type out the same thing. It's not just the time saved, which, I didn't have a stopwatch and a screen recorder, but apart from the time, it's not having to drop my thinking into that frame of reference, so I can think more deeply about the other problems to be solved. Sort of why ceo isn't an IC and why IC's aren't supposed to manage.

Detractors will point out that it must be a toy program, and that it won't work on a million line code base, and maybe it won't, but there's just so much that LLMs can do, as they exist now, that it's not hyperbole to say it's redefined programming, for those specific use cases. But where that use case is "build a web app", I don't know about you, but I use a lot of web apps these days.

These are the kind of the informed takes that I love. Thank you.

> Detractors will point out that it must be a toy program, and that it won't work on a million line code base, and maybe it won't

You might call me a detractor. I think of myself as being informed and feeling the need to point out where do LLMs end and programmers begin because apparently even on an educated forum like HN people shill and exaggerate all the time. That was the reason for most of my comments in this thread.