I spend 20-30% of my time at most actively coding.
And by my experience, most of that time is still not “typing in code”.
As a benchmark, I was working in two greenfield projects, each for about five years. One was about a topic very close to my doctorate thesis in signal processing, one an embedded device for a large scientific experiment - with the systems engineers and the scientists as users sitting next door. So, in both cases, extremely well defined, far better than what an average programmer will ever see. Some colleagues worked on the JWST. That org knows damn well how to engineer stuff.
At the end of these five years, I had both times around 60,000 lines of code. Pretty productive.
Now, let’s do the math: With about 250 work days per year, that is … 48 lines of code per day. You could type that in five minutes (and no, you don’t need a Dvorak keyboard layout to do this, LOL).
For old legacy projects, that average will be far far worse.
So, most of the productive time is actually thinking about code, and talking with people. And LLMs can’t do that. They can only type. And worse, doing that they don’t use the most important key for a programmer: The ‘delete’ key.
And by my experience, most of that time is still not “typing in code”.
As a benchmark, I was working in two greenfield projects, each for about five years. One was about a topic very close to my doctorate thesis in signal processing, one an embedded device for a large scientific experiment - with the systems engineers and the scientists as users sitting next door. So, in both cases, extremely well defined, far better than what an average programmer will ever see. Some colleagues worked on the JWST. That org knows damn well how to engineer stuff.
At the end of these five years, I had both times around 60,000 lines of code. Pretty productive.
Now, let’s do the math: With about 250 work days per year, that is … 48 lines of code per day. You could type that in five minutes (and no, you don’t need a Dvorak keyboard layout to do this, LOL).
For old legacy projects, that average will be far far worse.
So, most of the productive time is actually thinking about code, and talking with people. And LLMs can’t do that. They can only type. And worse, doing that they don’t use the most important key for a programmer: The ‘delete’ key.