There are a bunch of comments in this thread along the lines of "these are just toys" and "anyone could build these without an LLM".
I need to update my post to emphasize this, but that's kind of the point.
Every one of these 14 tools (with the possible exception of the OpenAI Audio debugger one, that one's quite hard) is something any web programmer could build relatively quickly.
... but not as quickly as I did with an LLM, because they almost all took less than 5 minutes from idea to finished implementation.
The key point is that if I didn't have Claude to help build these, I wouldn't have built them at all. None of them would justify even an hour of work - they weren't essential tools that I needed to get stuff done, they were just things I built because building them is now so cheap (in terms of time) that there was no reason not to.
That's the real magic here. The cost of knocking out a single page app that does something simple is often now lower than even the cost of spending a few minutes on Google trying to find an existing tool that solves the same problem.
If all someone does is write code based on specifications handed over by someone else then yes, they have cause to be worried - but in my career as a software engineer the "typing code into a computer" bit has only ever been 10-20% of the work that I do.
The big challenge of software development has always been turning human needs into working software. That requires a great depth of experience in terms of what's possible, what isn't possible, how software works and how to architect and design software to deliver value today while still staying flexible for future development.
LLMs can accelerate that process a bit, but I don't think they can replace it. Someone still has to drive the LLMs. I think people with software development skills are best placed to do that.
I think LLMs mean developers can build stuff faster, which reduces the cost of developing software.
My optimistic scenario is that this expands the market for custom software, a lot. Companies that would never have considered developing their own software - because they'd need six developers working for twelve months - can now afford to do so, because they need two developers for three months instead.
The result is more jobs for engineers, and engineers become more valuable because they'd can get more done.
I'm not an economist so I won't pretend I'm confident this will happen, but it's my optimistic scenario.
Not only it has the potential to increase productivity: it has the potential to lower the overall quality of software (by making it more accessible to people who don't really understand how to write good code).
I believe that we can already observe that modern tools/languages have made programming a lot more accessible, and that the average quality of software has decreased dramatically (not that all software is bad: just that this new accessibility brought a lot more bad software than good software).
Your example is interesting: it says "it's good because people will be able to produce more", not "developers will have more time to focus on fixing bugs and optimizing their code".
All these sort of statements assume growth is linear without justification, its more likely exponential. ie it took 2 years to get here, so it will take 2 more to get to this point, but in reality it may be 100 years to get to the next point. No one knows, and if in 2 years it is able to write that sort of code then the singularity is very close indeed.
Actually, i think it will take less than 2 years. I've been using Aider + Claude 3.5 Sonnet almost daily for a long time and the progress is very fast. We will see.
I need to update my post to emphasize this, but that's kind of the point.
Every one of these 14 tools (with the possible exception of the OpenAI Audio debugger one, that one's quite hard) is something any web programmer could build relatively quickly.
... but not as quickly as I did with an LLM, because they almost all took less than 5 minutes from idea to finished implementation.
The key point is that if I didn't have Claude to help build these, I wouldn't have built them at all. None of them would justify even an hour of work - they weren't essential tools that I needed to get stuff done, they were just things I built because building them is now so cheap (in terms of time) that there was no reason not to.
That's the real magic here. The cost of knocking out a single page app that does something simple is often now lower than even the cost of spending a few minutes on Google trying to find an existing tool that solves the same problem.