I think if sort of depends on the work you do. If you’re working on a single language and have been for a while then I imagine that much of the value LLMs might give you already live in your existing automation workflows.

I personally like co-pilot but I work across several languages and code bases where I seriously can’t remember how to do basic stuff. In those cases the automatic code generation from co-pilot speeds my efficiency, but it still can’t do anything actually useful aside from making me more productive.

I fully expect the tools to become “necessary” in making sure things like JSdoc and other domination is auto-updated when programmers alter something. Hell, if they become good enough at maintaining tests that would be amazing. So far there hasn’t been much improvement over the year we’ve used the tools though. Productivity isn’t even up across teams because too many developers put too much trust into what the LLMs tell them, which means we have far more cleanup to do than we did in the previous couple of years. I think we will handle this thing once we get our change management good enough at teaching people that LLMs aren’t necessarily more trustworthy than SO answers.

Would you consider hiring on a contract basis? I use AI tools like Copilot in vim, and have my own agent framework to ask questions or even edit files for me directly, which I have been trying to use more. And I could use a new contract. You can see my email in my HN profile.

What, in your mind, is the right answer to that question?

Good question.

The best answer is for someone who has found ways to boost their own productivity, but also understands the caveats such as hallucinations and not pasting proprietary information into text boxes on the internet.