The hyperbole on this keeps growing every time I see it. Soon we’ll be having people claiming they can do in 12 seconds what used to take them 17 years. What is never presented is proof. People (and programmers are no exception) are notoriously bad at estimating. We already did studies where people thought they were being faster with LLMs when they were in fact being slower.
As companies begin to rehire to fix the mess made by LLMs, it’s clear that just getting something out the door isn’t enough. It never was. Maintenance is an important part of any long-standing system.
Likewise, I think they're having wildly different results. Look at how differently humans drive vehicles, and realize they're doing the same with compute. Some people probably are working at light speed, and some people are actually slower like in the study.
And had to work on ios/android/web.
I'd consider myself a pretty fast programmer, and I grind 12 hours at a time, everyday until it's done.
But between all humans it's a rounding error compared to the output of an agent swarm.
For personal projects, I pick and choose how much to use AI. But for work, agents go brrrr.
And the last project truly would have taken me 6 months.
It was done in 3 days after fable 1:1 the design, setup the infrastructure, and turned all tasks and specs into code.
Everything was done day 1, but it took 2 days to manually clean it, test, and correct small issues.
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But that does make sense you're seeing "hyperboles" grow, AI is getting better very quickly, so you'll see the time saved estimations grow.
Less than a year ago I'd say it was saving me about a month of work, mainly because it sucked at UI.