alt Hacker NewsEric S. Raymond has basically stopped writing code by hand altogether. He consistently delivers high quality code without intervening to fix the LLM's output himself, much faster than he would have been able to alone. This is very bad news for camp 2 because it means one of three things:
1) he is extraordinarily lucky
2) he is extraordinary brilliant at manipulating LLMs
3) you really are "holding it wrong" and you are hobbling yourself with your failure to properly learn the tools
The first two seem rather unlikely.
Replies
"Better and faster than ESR" is not a particularly high bar to clear.
If ESR is consistently delivering high quality code now, it would be a first.
I'd need to see some transcripts of his conversations with coding agents, to believe this.
Being nerd-famous does not mean one is a good coder.
4) ESR is in the first group (most likely option)
I'm very confused by this logic. Why should I care about his output compared to what I observe from the larger group if he's not an outlier, and if he is an outlier, why would the second one be unlikely? The only way I can make sense of this is if you're claiming that he's both an exceptional coder and that skill in coding by hand is completely uncorrelated to skill in using LLMs to code, and it's not clear to me why that would be more likely than either or both of those being false.