this post was submitted on 24 May 2025
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All the while as we roast to death because all of this will take more resources than the entire energy output of a medium sized country.
I've been thinking about this for a while. Consider how quick LLM's are.
If the amount of energy spent powering your device (without an LLM), is more than using an LLM, then it's probably saving energy.
In all honesty, I've probably saved over 50 hours or more since I started using it about 2 months ago.
Coding has become incredibly efficient, and I'm not suffering through search-engine hell any more.
Edit:
Lemmy when someone uses AI to get a cheap, fast answer: “Noooo, it’s killing the planet!”
Lemmy when someone uses a nuclear reactor to run Doom: Dark Ages on a $20,000 RGB space heater: “Based”
Just writing code uses almost no energy. Your PC should be clocking down when you're not doing anything. 1GHz is plenty for text editing.
Does ChatGPT (or whatever LLM you use) reduce the number of times you hit build? Because that's where all the electricity goes.
What kind of code are you writing that your CPU goes to sleep? If you follow any good practices like TDD, atomic commits, etc, and your code base is larger than hello world, your PC will be running at its peak quite a lot.
Example: linting on every commit + TDD. You'll be making loads of commits every day, linting a decent code base will definitely push your CPU to 100% for a few seconds. Running tests, even with caches, will push CPU to 100% for a few minutes. Plus compilation for running the app, some apps take hours to compile.
In general, text editing is a small part of the developer workflow. Only junior devs spend a lot of time typing stuff.
Anything that's per-commit is part of the "build" in my opinion.
But if you're running a language server and have stuff like format-on-save enabled, it's going to use a lot more power as you're coding.
But like you said, text editing is a small part of the workflow, and looking up docs and browsing code should barely require any CPU, a phone can do it with fractions of a Watt, and a PC should be underclocking when the CPU is underused.
What do you mean "build"? It's part of the development process.