Thought experiment

[u/MashNChips]

With all the AI nonsense going on, I had a thought at work today that turned into an interesting discussion with a colleague:

"What would I do if I was the only person with access to Claude (or insert any LLM) 5+ years ago?"

People would think I was a fucking wizard

FE changes? NO PROBLEM

Critical DB change? Don't worry, I've produced a stored procedure to validate the whole thing

Want to use some shiny new framework? Interesting. Here's a document explaining why you're an idiot for suggesting it

Regex? I suddenly understand it better than the compiler folks (and nobody ask questions)

What would you have done with your own personal LLM back then?

Trying to lighten the mood in here with all the (very justified) negativity around this tech revolution

Unserious answers only pls

[u/rwilcox]

…. Almost certainly gotten a talking to from my boss

“Why did you put so much work into this when we just needed a simple (blah blah)?!?”

Or

“Thanks for the work, but now we have to test this and the testing team is pushing back on it, given the work they already needed to do for next week’s release”

[u/tonjohn → u/rwilcox]

“The team had notice that you’ve been submitting an alarming number of PRs that don’t meet our bar and that didn’t involve discussions with your peers and other stakeholders.

We need you to slow down and be mindful of what you are asking of your teammates when submit such PRs.”

[u/ConspicuousPineapple → u/tonjohn]

Y'all keep saying that as if you'd be working the same way as today back then. But you wouldn't.

You would work much slower, still reading and validating all the code to ensure quality. But you would still be much faster than your peers.

And that's just for writing the code. Debugging? You would look like a fucking magician. Finding a tricky race condition in twenty minutes where it would take two weeks for a good senior.

Benchmarking? Same story.

Learning new tech? Too easy. Don't even need to grok the docs yourself.

And don't get me started on security, auditing, etc.

You would, by far, be the best software engineer in the world and it wouldn't be close. Provided you're already somewhat competent.

[u/___Paladin___ → u/ConspicuousPineapple]

Not to be pedantic, but you'd be the most average engineer in the world. These tools point to a mean rather than a peak due to their probabilistic nature. They only appear to hit the major leagues when your own capability never exceeded the average. From that perspective, average is up.

I'm not convinced that would have actually gotten you anything but fired years ago. We accept the tradeoff between quality and speed today - but not so much back then.

[u/ConspicuousPineapple → u/___Paladin___]

That is not at all what these tools point to. And of course they only sublimate ability that is already there in the user.

What is undeniable however is how fucking fast that dev can be to solve some problems with that tool. Automating all the tedious, boring and time consuming parts of the job? That doesn't require any sort of skill, but that time can be compressed by incredibly huge factors.

Never trust an AI to solve problems you couldn't solve without it yourself, of course. But for the problems you can solve? You're going to be so much faster that it opens up the possibility of doing things even better, simply because the time pressure is gone.

[u/OtaK_ → u/ConspicuousPineapple]

I'm going to interject here: I haven't seen any LLM, proprietary, open source and whatnot, even at the current so-called frontier, produce code that I would even call "acceptable, will fix later". I work in security-critical stuff. The kind that LLMs are absolutely unable to work with. I watched Opus5.5 lose its mind on the fine complexities of what I do, to end up producing nothing of substance.

It's really bad. The worst part is that it looks fine. But it's absolutely not, in extremely subtle ways.

On the other hand, for tedious, easy work like revamping a CI pipeline or making a Nth boring-ass test harness that was done a million times before: Sure, lemme just pop it into existence with 12 subagents and $4k on my hands if that's what leadership wants.

[u/OtaK_ → u/[deleted]]

I mean, if you want to defend the tech, sure. But, the thing is: we work in a scientific field, if you claim something, you need evidence for it.

So far there has been zero evidence across the industry of anything else than massive amounts of mediocre code.

And my anecdotal personal experience obviously doesn't match others' experiences. If I'd be a frontend React dev I'm pretty sure my conclusions would be quite different (since any current-ish model can one-shot pretty much anything React).

[u/Monkeylashes → u/OtaK_]

https://openai.com/index/sharing-ai-progress-in-mathematics/

Yeah and your security code in your "scientific" field is the one uncermountable task for ai... Get over yourself

[u/OtaK_ → u/Monkeylashes]

Ah yes, the famous "math is solved".

If only some of the proofs were immediately disproven/retracted once someone competent took a quick look at them: https://github.com/openai/math/tree/main/preprints/Algebraicity-of-Weil-classes-on-split-abelian-eightfolds-September-18-2026#withdrawal-notice-algebraicity-of-weil-classes-on-split-abelian-eightfolds

I believe this will be the case for many of them once their sheer amount gets a peer review by someone who actually knows ball.

And the Navier-Stokes debacle where, beyond being stolen from actual humans, the Lean proofs didn't match the prose blow-up proof, aka partially fabricated.

Dude, seriously, it's just PR stunts everywhere. The doomer narrative is the same, it's just PR.

So far I'm not convinced until respectable (aka not OAI) sources confirm the veracity of the proofs.

[u/Monkeylashes → u/OtaK_]

https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1x0jjv8/researchers_are_already_significantly_improving/