I am confident that LLMs siginificantly boost software development productivity (I would say 20-50%) and am completely sure it’s not even close to 5x.
However, despite I agree with your conclusion, I would like to point out that timeframes are pretty short. 2 years ago (~exactly GPT-4 launch date) LLMs were barely making any impact. I think tools started to resemble the current state around 1 year ago (~exactly Claude 3 Opus launch date).
Now, suppose we had 5x boost for a year. Would it be very visible? We would have got 5 years of progress in 1 year but had software landscape changed a lot in 5 years in pre-LLM era? Comparing 2017 and 2022, I don’t feel like that much changed.
I am confident that LLMs siginificantly boost software development productivity (I would say 20-50%) and am completely sure it’s not even close to 5x.
However, despite I agree with your conclusion, I would like to point out that timeframes are pretty short. 2 years ago (~exactly GPT-4 launch date) LLMs were barely making any impact. I think tools started to resemble the current state around 1 year ago (~exactly Claude 3 Opus launch date).
Now, suppose we had 5x boost for a year. Would it be very visible? We would have got 5 years of progress in 1 year but had software landscape changed a lot in 5 years in pre-LLM era? Comparing 2017 and 2022, I don’t feel like that much changed.