Yeah, it's very clear that the person that wrote the above comment didn't actually grok what the purpose of the article was. Thanks for providing a counterpoint that I think actually summarizes the article correctly.
To demonstrate engineers may not be as skilled and knowledgeable as they appear. To make such a comment then turn around and make an announcement days later indicates that the engineers are not skilled in the tools they’re using or even possibly the domain they’re working in.
The quote doesn’t provide warrant for this claim. The developer did a great job investigating the applicability of a new tool and it appears the investigation yielded fruit.
Being an expert software developer - which Jarred Sumner indisputably is, having created Bun - doesn't automatically make you an expert on predicting the improvements in software development performance that LLMs enable. All of us - experts and amateurs alike - are in the process of figuring that out, in real time, around the world, right now.
Underestimating how quickly a non-trivial project will come together is an almost unheard of phenomenon. It used to invariably be the other way around, to the point that there are laws about it, like Hofstadter's Law, which says that projects always take longer than anticipated, even when accounting for the law itself. Or Fred Brooks' work, which puts limits on how much the development of software projects can be sped up.
The sane takeaway here is that if what's being reported is true (keeping in mind it's coming from a newly minted Anthropic employee), it implies an astonishing, unheard of improvement in software development speed, at least for certain kinds of tasks, enabled by LLMs.
To somehow twist that into "experts may not be as skilled and knowledgeable as they appear" or "not skilled in the tools they’re using" makes me think of the Charles Babbage quote, "I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such [an opinion]."
He's tweeting his experiences. Calling this "sprinting" and "evangelizing" is just rhetoric. Posting about a project you're working on is hardly amateurish.
Ugh, I really find this sort of thing frustrating. I like people developing, and testing, and ideating, and exploring in public!
This is one of my problems with academia: people only sharing results when they're positive and complete. I want to hear about what people tried that didn't work, and see the string of failures. People are already inclined to avoid sharing their work out of concern that they'll be judged--let's not encourage that behavior, please.
This title is so click bait-y and misleading compared to what the actual article is about it's tough not to feel disappointed this is on the front page. @dang
Any suggestions on what to add to answer the question better? I tried to cover this in "Why I switched", "When to use Cursor", and "My current setup" sections.
