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Hardly, if you worked with the web in the mid 90’s, modern tooling is a much larger improvement than what LLMs bring to the table on their own. Of course they aren’t on their own, people are leveraging generations of improvements and then stacking yet another boost on top of them.

Programming today is literally hundreds of times more productive than in 1950. It doesn’t feel that way because of scope creep, but imagine someone trying to create a modern AAA game using only assembly and nothing else. C didn’t show up until the 70’s, and even Fortran was a late 50’s invention. Go far enough back and people would set toggle switches and insert commands that way no keyboards whatsoever.

Move forward to the 1960’s and people coded on stacks of punch cards and would need to wait for access to a compiler overnight. So just imagine the productivity boost of a text editor and a compiler. I’m not taking an IDE with syntax checks etc, just a simple text editor was a huge step up.

And so forth.



> And so forth.

You're missing things like LISP and Forth, which allowed for lot of productivity early on. It usually had a performance cost, though.


Well, even with more primitive tools people would crete an abstraction of their own for the game - even in very old games you will find some rudimentary scripting languages and abstractions.


Yes that's the point. You needed to do this (accidental) work, in order to do what you actually wanted to achieve. Hence there was less time spend on the actual (~business) problem and hence the whole thing was less productive




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