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> My personal productivity has skyrocketed in the last 12 months. Has your productivity objectively, measurably improved or does it just feel like it has impro

> My personal productivity has skyrocketed in the last 12 months. Has your productivity objectively, measurably improved or does it just feel like it has improved? Recall the METR study which caught programmers self-reporting they were 20% faster with AI when they were actually 20% slower.

jasonsb 1y ago
Objectively. I’m now tackling tasks I wouldn’t have even considered two or three years ago, but the biggest breakthrough has been overcoming procrastination. When AI handles over 50% of the work, there’s a 90% chance I’ll finish the entire task faster than it would normally take me just to get started on something new.
- svachalek 1y ago
  I don't think it's helped me do anything I couldn't do, in fact I've learned it's far easier to do hard things myself than trying to prompt an AI out of the ditches it will dig trying to do it. But I also find it's great for getting painful and annoying tasks out of the way that I really can't motivate to do myself.
  - wiml 1y ago
    I think there might be cases, for some people or some tasks, where the difficulty of filling in a blank page is greater than the difficulty of fixing an entire page of errors. Even if you have to do all the same mental work, it feels like a different category of work.
  - cheema33 1y ago
    > I don't think it's helped me do anything I couldn't do I am seeing a pattern here. It appears that AI isn't for everyone. Not everyone's personality may be a good fit for using AI. Just like not everybody is a good candidate for being a software dev, or police officer etc. I used to think that it is a tool. Like a car is. Everybody would want one. But that appears not be the case. For me, I used AI every day as a tool, for work and and home tasks. It is a massive help for me.
    - noobly 1y ago
      It’s weird how divisive it is. For me it’s completely dependent on the quality of the output. Lately, it’s been more of a hinderance.
    - majormajor 1y ago
      What home tasks do you use it for? It's hard for me to imagine many. It's not doing the dishes or watering the plants. If I wanted to rearrange the room I could have it mock up some images, I guess...
      - joemazerino 1y ago
        Figuring out which fertilizer, how often to water and sun placement for the plants is a useful AI request.
        ht_th 1y ago
        Is it? It'll take a while for fertilizer and sun placement to take visually effect, and there's risk that short term effects aren't indicative of long term effects. How can you verify the recommendations are sound, valid, safe, complete, etc., without trying them out? And trying out unsound, invalid, unsafe, incomplete, etc., recommendations might result in dead plants in a couple of weeks.
        lithocarpus 1y ago
        Eh, for something like this the cost of it being wrong might be pretty small, but I'd bet odds are good that its recommendations will be better than whatever I might randomly come up with without doing any research. And I don't have the time to do the research on normal old google where it's really hard to find exactly what I want. I've found it immensely helpful for giving real world recommendations about things like this, that I know how to find on my own but don't have the time to do all the reading and synthesizing.
        Dilettante_ 1y ago
        I personally use chatgpt for initial discovery on these sorts of problems, maybe ask a probing question or two and then go back to traditional search engines to get a very rough second opinion(which might also lead to another round of questions). By the end of that process I'll either have seen that the llm is not helpful for that particular problem, or have an answer that I'm "reasonably confident" is "good enough" to use for something medium to low risk like potentially killing a plant. And I got there within 10-20 minutes, half of that being me just reading the 'bots summary.
  - serpix 1y ago
    A very good tip: you get one chance to prompt them to a new path failing that clear the context and start again from the current premise. Use only actionable prompts, negations don't work on ai and they don't work on people.
- agency 1y ago
  > I’m now tackling tasks I wouldn’t have even considered two or three years ago Ok, so subjective
  - dotslashmain 1y ago
    any objective measure of "productivity" (when it comes to knowledge work) is, when you dig down into it enough, ultimately subjective.
  - moralestapia 1y ago
    "Not done" vs "Done" is as objective as it gets.
    - miyoji 1y ago
      You obviously have never worked a company that spends time arguing about the "definition of done". It's one of the most subjective topics I know about.
      - vorticalbox 1y ago
        At work we call this scope creep.
      - fbxio 1y ago
        It removes ambiguity. Everyone knows when work is truly considered done, avoiding rework, surprises, and finger-pointing down the line.
      - ycombigators 1y ago
        Sounds like a company is not adequately defining what the deliverables are. Task: Walk to the shops & buy some milk. Deliverables: 1. Video of walking to the shops (including capturing the newspaper for that day at the local shop) 2. Reciept from local store for milk. 3. Physical bottle of Milk.
        tbossanova 1y ago
- kenjackson 1y ago
  This. I had this long standing dispute that I just never had the energy to look up what needed to be done to resolve it. I just told it to ChatGPT and it generated everything -- including the emails I needed to send and who to send them to. Two weeks later and it was taken care of. I had sat on it for literally 3 months until then. If I could have something that said, "Here are some things that it looks like you're procrastinating on -- do you want me to get started on them for you?" -- that would probably be crazy useful.
  - meowface 1y ago
    Exactly. Agentic LLMs are amazing for people who suffer from chronic akrasia.
    - rosstex 1y ago
      OH wow, a word to describe me
      - _9ptr 1y ago
        The latin word for that is "incontinentia".
    - latexr 1y ago
      Those are exactly the people who shouldn’t use these tools. They’ll be sucked in to whatever bullshit the LLM peddles them and become unable to leave.
      - meowface 1y ago
        As long as it's helping them be productive, I don't really see an issue with that. Going from doing nothing to doing something is a net boost.
        latexr 1y ago
        But it’s not helping them “be productive” (which is a horrible metric anyway, life is not about productivity above everything else), it’s sucking their lives and severing their relationships and connection to the real world. https://archive.ph/20250924025805/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/08/technology/ai-chatbots-delusions-chatgpt.html https://archive.ph/20250924025805/https://www.nytimes.com/20... https://archive.is/26aHF https://archive.is/26aHF
- OtherShrezzing 1y ago
  > I’m now tackling tasks I wouldn’t have even considered two or three years ago Could you give some examples, and an indication of your level of experience in the domains? The statement has a much different meaning if you were a junior developer 2 years ago versus a staff engineer.
  - PeterFBell 1y ago
    I have been coding on and off (more off than on) for 47 years. I kinda stopped paying attention when we got past jquery and was never a fan of prototypical inheritance. Never built anything with tailwind, Next.js, etc. After spending some time writing copy, user stories and a design brief (all iterative with ChatGPT) cursor one shot my (simple) web app and I was live (once I'd spent a couple hours documenting my requirements and writing my copy) in 20 minutes of vibe coding. I've been adding small features in a language I don't program in using libraries I'm not familiar with thhat meet my modest functional requirements in a couple minutes each. I work with an LLM to refine my prompt, put it into cursor, run the app locally, look at the diffs, commit, push and I'm live on vercel within a minute or two. I don't have any good metrics for productivity, so I'm 100% subjective but I can say that even if I'd been building in Rails (it's been ~4 years but I coded in it for a decade) it would have taken me at least 8 hours to have an app where I was happy with both the functionality and the look and feel so a 10x improvement in productivity for that task feels about right. And having a "buddy" I can discuss a project with makes activation energy lower allowing me to complete more. Also, YC videos I don't have the time to watch, I get a transcript, feed into chatGTP, ask for the key take aways I could apply to my business (it's in a project where it has context on stage, industry, maturity, business goals, key challenges, etc) so I get the benefits of 90 minutes of listening plus maybe 15 minutes of summarizing, reviewing and synthesis in typically 5-6 minutes - and it'd be quicker if I built a pipeline (something I'm vibe coding next month) Wouldn't want to do business without it.
    - majormajor 1y ago
      How do you deal with security for web stuff? I wouldn't host anything vibe-coded publicly because I'm not enough of an expert in web/frontend to even double-check that it's not generating some giant holes.
- stavros 1y ago
  Same. It takes the drudgery out of creating, so I can at least start the projects. Then I can go down into the detail just enough that the AI doesn't produce crap, but without needing to write the actual writes of code myself. Hell, in the past few days I started making something to help me write documents for work (https://www.writelucid.cc https://www.writelucid.cc) and a viewer for all my blood tests (https://github.com/skorokithakis/bt-viewer https://github.com/skorokithakis/bt-viewer), and I don't think I would have made either without an LLM.
  - lxgr 1y ago
    Same here. I’ve single-shot created a few Raycast plugins for TLV decoding that save me several seconds to a few minutes per task which I use almost daily at work. Would have never done that without LLMs.
- ryukoposting 1y ago
  What tasks is it doing 50% of the work on for you?
  - evilduck 1y ago
    Not who you asked, but I upgraded NextJS in a couple of repos by just telling Claude Code to do it. I've had it swap out and upgrade libraries successfully in one shot too. It will usually create good enough Page Objects for E2Es and scaffold out the test file, which speeds up the development process a bit. Same for upgrading Node versions in some Lambda projects, just tell it to go and come back later. Instruct it to run the test and build steps and it's also like having a mini CI system running too. Personally, I think it really shines at doing the boring maintenance and tech debt work. None of these are hard or complex tasks but they all take up time and for a buck or two in tokens I can have it doing simple but tedious things while I'm working on something else.
    - ryukoposting 1y ago
      > Personally, I think it really shines at doing the boring maintenance and tech debt work. It shines at doing the boring maintenance and tech debt work for web. My experiences with it, as a firmware dev, have been the diametric opposite of yours. The only model I've had any luck with as an agent is Sonnet 4 in reasoning mode. At an absolutely glacial pace, it will sometimes write some almost-correct unit tests. This is only valuable because I can have it to do that while I'm in a meeting or reading emails. The only reason I use it at all is because it's coming out of my company's pocket, not mine.
      - evilduck 1y ago
        For sure. There's tons of training data in the models for the JS and TS language and the specific tasks I outlined, but not specifically just the web, I have several Node or Bun + Typescript + SQLite CLI utilities that it also helps with. I definitely pick my battles and lean in to what it works best for though. Anything it appears to struggle at I'll just do manually and develop it like we always did. It's rarely not a net positive to me but it's very frequently a negligible improvement. Anything that doesn't pay off in spades I typically don't try again until new models release or new tools or approaches are available.
- calrain 1y ago
  My programming productivity has improved a lot with Claude Code. One thing I've noticed is that I don't have a circle of people where I can discus programming with, and having an LLM to answer questions and wireframe up code has been amazing. My job doesn't require programming, but programming makes my job much easier, and the benefits have been great.
- scragz 1y ago
  there's some minority that's in the venn diagram of being good at programming, being good at AI, then also being good at using AI for programming (which is mostly project management), and if everything aligns then there are superhuman productivity gains. I'm tackling projects solo I never would have even attempted before but I could see people getting bad results and giving up.
  - serpix 1y ago
    Same here! Started learning self hosted k3s, with terraform and IaC and all the bells and whistles. I would never have had the energy to look up how to even get started. In three hours I have a cluster.
    - lelanthran 1y ago
      Doesn't sound like you learned it, sounds like it did it for you, using you as the tool. IOW, can you redo it by yourself? If you can't then you did not learn it.
      - sally_glance 1y ago
        Is that really a fair comparison? I think the amount of people who can memorize each and every configuration item is vanishingly small... even when I was bootstrapping k8s clusters before the dawn of LLMs I had to lookup current documentation and maybe some up to date tutorials. Knowing the abstract steps and tripwires yes, but details will always have to be looked up. If just not to miss any new developments.
        lelanthran 1y ago
        > Is that really a fair comparison? Well, yes it is; you can't very well claim to have learned something if you are unable to do it.
        alvah 1y ago
- scrollaway 1y ago
  Incredible how many people here just don’t believe you because it doesn’t reflect their personal experience. I want to second your experience as I’ve had the same as well. Tackling SO many more tasks than before and at such a crazy pace. I’ve started entire businesses I wouldn’t have just because of AI. But at the same time, some people have weird blockers and just can’t use AI. I don’t know what it is about it - maybe it’s a mental block? Wrong frame of mind? It’s those same people who end up saying “I spend more time fighting the ai and refining prompts than I would on the end task”. I’m very curious what it is that actually causes this divide.
  - billy99k 1y ago
    Now is a good time to use it to make money, before it gets to the point where everyone is using it. I've been using it for almost a year now, and it's definitely improved my productivity. I've reduced work that normally takes a few hours to 20 minutes. Where I work, my manager was going to hire a junior developer and ended up getting a pro subscription to Claude instead. I also think it will be a concern for that 50-something developer that gets laid off in the coming years, has no experience with AI, and then can't find a job because it's a requirement. My cousin was a 53 year old developer and got laid off two years ago. He looked for a job for 6 months and then ended up becoming an auto mechanic at half the salary, when his unemployment ran out. The problem is that he was the subject matter expert on old technology and virtually nobody uses it anymore.
- fsloth 1y ago
  ”I’m now tackling tasks I wouldn’t have even considered two or three years ago” This. 100x this.
logicprog 1y ago
The design of that study is pretty bad, and as a result it doesn't end up actually showing what it claims to show / what people claim it does. https://www.fightforthehuman.com/are-developers-slowed-down-by-ai-evaluating-an-rct-and-what-it-tells-us-about-developer-productivity/ https://www.fightforthehuman.com/are-developers-slowed-down-...
- singron 1y ago
  I don't think there is anything factually wrong with this criticism, but it largely rehashes caveats that are already well explored in the original paper, which goes through unusual lengths to clearly explain many ways the study is flawed. The study gets so much attention since it's one of the few studies on the topic with this level of rigor on real-world scenarios, and it explains why previous studies or anecdotes may have claimed perceived increases in productivity even if there wasn't any actual increases. It clearly sets a standard that we can't just ask people if they felt more productive (or they need to feel massively more productive to clearly overcome this bias).
  - logicprog 1y ago
    > it largely rehashes caveats that are already well explored in the original paper, which goes through unusual lengths to clearly explain many ways the study is flawed. ... The study gets so much attention since it's one of the few studies on the topic with this level of rigor on real-world scenarios, Yes, but most people don't seem aware of those caveats, and this is a good summary of them, and I think it does undercut the "level of rigour" of the study. Additionally, some of what the article points out is not explicitly acknowledged and connected by the study itself. For instance, if you actually split up the tasks by type, some tasks show a speed up and some show a slowdown, and the qualitative comments by developers about where they thought AI was good/bad aligned very well with which saw what results. Or (iirc) the fact that the task timing was per task, but developer's post hoc assessments were a prediction of how much they thought they were sped up on average across all tasks, meaning it's not really comparing the same things when comparing how developers felt vs how things actually went. Or the fact that developers were actually no less accurate in predicting times to task completion overall wrt to AI vs non-AI. > and it explains why previous studies or anecdotes may have claimed perceived increases in productivity even if there wasn't any actual increases. Framing it that way assumes as an already established fact that needs to be explained that AI does not provide more productivity Which actually demonstrates, inadvertently, why the study is so popular! People want it to be true, so even if the study is so chock full of caveats that it can't really prove that fact let alone explain it, people appeal to it anyway. > It clearly sets a standard that we can't just ask people if they felt more productive Like we do for literally every other technological tool we use in software? > (or they need to feel massively more productive to clearly overcome this bias). All of this assumes a definition of productivity that's based on time per work unit done, instead of perhaps the amount of effort required to get a unit of work done, or the extra time for testing, documentation, shoring up edge cases, polishing features, that better tools allow. Or the ability to overcome dread and procrastination that comes from dealing with rote, boilerplate tasks. AI makes me so much more productive that friends and my wife have commented on it explicitly without needing to be prompted, for a lot of reasons.
CuriouslyC 1y ago
If you want another data point, you can just look at my company github (https://github.com/orgs/sibyllinesoft/repositories https://github.com/orgs/sibyllinesoft/repositories). ~27 projects in the last 5 weeks, probably on the order of half a million lines of code, and multiple significant projects that are approaching ship readiness (I need to stop tuning algorithms and making stuff gorgeous and just fix installation/ensure cross platform is working, lol).
- shafyy 1y ago
  Lines of codes is not a measure of anything meaningful on its own. The mere fact that you suggest this as prove that you are more productive makes me think you are not.
  - CuriouslyC 1y ago
    The SWE industry is eagerly awaiting your proposed accurate metric. I find that people who dismiss LoC out of hand without supplying better metrics tend to be low performers trying to run for cover.
    - oofbey 1y ago
      Loc is so easy to game. Reformat. Check in a notebook. Move things around. Pointless refactor. If nobody is watching loc, it’s generally a good metric. But as soon as people start valuing it, it becomes useless.
      - sebastiennight 1y ago
        See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law and, in the case of "Lines of code" as a metric: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect
    - dmamills 1y ago
      A metric I'd be interested in is the number of clients you can convince to use this slop.
jama211 1y ago
Not this again. That study had serious problems. But I’m not even going to argue about that. I want to raise something no one else seems to mention about AI in coding work. I do a lot of work now with AI that I used to code by hand, and if you told me I was 20% slower on average, I would say “that’s totally fine it’s still worth it” because the EFFORT level from my end feels so much less. It’s like, a robot vacuum might take way longer to clean the house than if I did it by hand sure. But I don’t regret the purchase, because I have to do so much less _work_. Coding work that I used to procrastinate about because it was tedious or painful I just breeze through now. I’m so much less burnt out week to week. I couldn’t care less if I’m slower at a specific task, my LIFE is way better now I have AI to assist me with my coding work, and that’s super valuable no matter what the study says. (Though I will say, I believe I have extremely good evidence that in my case I’m also more productive, averages are averages and I suspect many people are bad at using AI, but that’s an argument for another time).
- blks 1y ago
  Often someone’s personal productivity with AI means someone else have to dig through their piles of rubbish to review PR they committed. In your particular case it sounds like you’re rapidly loosing your developer skills, and enjoy that now you have to put less effort and think less.
  - wussboy 1y ago
    We know that relying heavily on Google Maps makes you less able to navigate without Google Maps. I don't think there's research on this yet, but I would be stunned if the same process isn't at play here.
    - lukan 1y ago
      I know that I am better at navigating with google maps than average people, because I navigated for years without it (partly on purpose). I know when not to trust it. I know when to ignore recommendations on recalculated routes. Same with LLMs. I am better with it, because I know how to solve things without the help of it. I understand the problem space and the limitations. Also I understand how hype works and why they think they need it (investors money). In other words, no, just using google maps or ChatGPT does not make me dumb. Only using it and blindly trusting it would.
tunesmith 1y ago
Data point: I run a site where users submit a record. There was a request months ago to allow users to edit the record after submitting. I put it off because while it's an established pattern it touches a lot of things and I found it annoying busy work and thus low priority. So then gpt5-codex came out and allowed me to use it in codex cli with my existing member account. I asked it to support edit for that feature all the way through the backend with a pleasing UI that fit my theme. It one-shotted it in about ten minutes. I asked for one UI adjustment that I decided I liked better, another five minutes, and I reviewed and released it to prod within an hour. So, you know, months versus an hour.
- paulryanrogers 1y ago
  Is the hour really comparable to months spent not working on it?
  - rpdillon 1y ago
    He's referring to the reality that AI helps you pick up and finish tasks that you otherwise would have put off. I see this all day every day with my side projects as well as security and customer escalations that come into my team. It's not that Giant Project X was done six times as fast. It's more like we were able to do six small but consequential bug fixes and security updates while we continued to push on the large feature.
  - jama211 1y ago
    “If you make a machine that can wash the dishes in an hour, is that more productive than not doing the dishes for months?” - Yes! That’s the definition of productivity!! The dishes are getting done now and they weren’t before! lol
bozhark 1y ago
Yes, for me. Instead of getting overwhelmed doing to many things, I can offload a lot of menial and time-driven tasks Reviews are absolutely necessary but take less time than creation
- jama211 1y ago
  Exactly. Is HN full of old codgers demanding that we can’t possibly use a calculator because that might mean we’d lose the precious skill of how to use a slide rule? The old man energy in here is insane
james_marks 1y ago
Yesterday is a good example- in 2 days, I completed what I expected to be a week’s worth of heads-down coding. I had to take a walk and make all new goals. The right AI, good patterns in the codebase and 20 years of experience and it is wild how productive I can be. Compare that to a few years ago, when at the end of the week, it was the opposite.
- al_be_back 1y ago
  makes no sense. how are you comparing yesterday with a "a few years ago" ?
rpdillon 1y ago
My personal project output has gone up dramatically since I started using AI, because I can now use times of night where I'm otherwise too mentally tired, to work with AI to crank through a first draft of a change that I can then iterate on later. This has allowed me to start actually implementing side projects that I've had ideas about for years and build software for myself in a way I never could previously (at least not since I had kids). I know it's not some amazing GDP-improving miracle, but in my personal life it's been incredibly rewarding.
- animex 1y ago
  This, 1000x. I had a dozen domains and projects on the shelf for years and now 8 of them have significant active development. I've already deployed 2 sites to production. My github activity is lighting up like a Christmas tree.
- boogieknite 1y ago
  i find a lot of value in using it to give half baked ideas momentum. some sort of "shower thought" will occur to me for a personal project while im at work and ill prompt Claude code to analyze and demonstrate an implementation for review later on the other hand i believe my coworker may have taken it too far. it seems like productivity has significantly slipped. in my perception the approaches hes using are convoluted and have no useful outcome. im almost worried about him because his descriptions of what hes doing make no sense to me or my teammates. hes spending a lot of time on it. im considering telling him to chill out but who knows, maybe im just not as advanced a user as him? anyone have experience with this?
  - r_lee 1y ago
    Do you mean like convoluted agentic stuff, markdown files etc? Or like AI delusion?
    - boogieknite 1y ago
      the former it started as an approach to a mass legacy code migration. sound idea with potential to save time. i followed along and understood his markdown and agent stuff for analyzing and porting legacy code i reviewed results which apply to my projects. results were mixed bag but i think it saved some time overall. but now i dont get where hes going with his ai aspirations my best attempt to understand is he wants to work entirely though chats, no writing code, and hes doing so by improving agents through chats. hes really swept up in the entire concept. i consider myself optimistic about ai but his enthusiasm feels misplaced its to the point where his work is slipping and management is asking him where his results are. were a small team and management isnt savvy enough to see hes getting NOTHING done and i wont sell him out. however if this is a known delusional pattern id like to address it and point to a definition and/or past cases so he can recognize the pattern and avoid trouble
yokoprime 1y ago
I'm objectively faster. Not necessarily if I'm working on a task I've done routinely for years, but when taking on new challenges I'm up and running much faster. A lot of it have to do with me offloading doing the basic research while allowing myself to be interrupted; it's not a problem that people reach out with urgent matters while I'm taking on a challenge I've only just started to build towards. Being able to correct the ai where I can tell it's making false assumptions or going off the rails helps speed things up
Kiro 1y ago
The "you only think you're more productive" argument is tiresome. Yes, I know for sure that I'm more productive. There's nothing uncertain about it. Does it lead to other problems? No doubt, but claiming my productivity gains are imaginary is not serious. I've seen a lot of people who previously touted that it doesn't work at all use that study as a way to move the goalpost and pretend they've been right all along.
- m_fayer 1y ago
  We’re being accused of false consciousness!
- chrysoprace 1y ago
  I would be interested to know how you measure your productivity gains though, in an objective way where you're not the victim of bias. I just recently had to rate whether I felt like I got more done by leaning more on Claude Code for a week to do a toy project and while I _feel_ like I was more productive, I was already biased to think so, and so I was a lot more careful with my answer, especially as I had to spend a considerable amount of time either reworking the generated code or throwing away several hours of work because it simply made things up.
  - Kiro 1y ago
    It sounds like you're very productive without AI or that your perceived gains are pretty small. To me, it's such a stark contrast that asking how I measure it is like asking me to objectively verify that a car is faster than walking.
    - laserlight 1y ago
      “I'm eating fewer calories yet keep putting on weight.” There's a reason self-reported measures are questioned: they have been wildly off in different domains. Objectively verifying that a car is faster than walking is easy. When it's not easy to objectively prove something, then there are a lot that could go wrong, including the disagreements on the definition of what's being measured.
m_fayer 1y ago
It seems like the programming world is increasingly dividing into “LLMs for coding are at best marginally useful and produce huge tech debt” vs “LLMs are a game changing productivity boost”. I truly don’t know how to account for the discrepancy, I can imagine many possible explanations. But what really gets my goat is how political this debate is becoming. To the point that the productivity-camp, of which I’m a part, is being accused of deluding themselves. I get that OpenAI has big ethical issues. And that there’s a bubble. And that ai is damaging education. And that it may cause all sorts of economic dislocation. (I emphatically Do Not get the doomers, give me a break). But all those things don’t negate the simple fact that for many of us, LLMs are an amazing programming tool, and we’ve been around long enough to distinguish substance from illusion. I don’t need a study to confirm what’s right in front of me.
- Sharlin 1y ago
  I’d love to know whether and to what extent the people for which AI has been a huge boost are those who were already producing slop, and now they have AI that can produce that slop much faster.
  - Eisenstein 1y ago
    By framing it in such a way you are making personal and it becomes less about defending the process of using AI and more about defending their integrity as a developer. You will not get anything useful when someone responds in that way, just a heated argument where they feel deeply insulted and act accordingly.
    - jama211 1y ago
      Well said
  - jama211 1y ago
    Sheesh, how do you expect to be taken seriously when you sneer through gritted teeth like that? I work with many developers of varying skill levels, all of which use AI. The only ones who have attempted to turn in slop are ones that basically turned out that they can’t code at all and didn’t keep their job long. Those who know what they’re doing, use it as a TOOL. They carefully build, modify, review and test everything and usually write about half of it themselves and it meets our strict standards. Which you would know if you’d listened to what we’ve been telling you in good faith.
tomrod 1y ago
I'm not who you responded to. I see about a 40% to 60% speed up as a solution architect when I sit down to code and about a 20% speedup when building/experimenting with research artifacts (I write papers occasionally). I have always been a careful tester, so my UAT hasn't blown up out of proportion. The big issue I see is rust it generates code using 2023-recent conventions, though I understand there is some improvement in thst direction. Our hiring pipeline is changing dramatically as well, since the normal things a junior needs to know (code, syntax) is no longer as expensive. Joel Spolsky's mantra to higher curious people who get things done captures well the folks I find are growing well as juniors.
citizenkeen 1y ago
I have a very big hobby code project I’ve been working on for years. AI has not made me much more productive at work. I can only work on my hobby project when I’m tired after the kids go to bed. AI has made me 3x productive there because reviewing code is easier than architecting. I can sense if it’s bad, I have good tests, the requests are pretty manageable (make a new crud page for this DTO using app conventions). But at work where I’m fresh and tackling hard problems that are 50% business political will? If anything it slows me down.
- jama211 1y ago
  Bureaucracy is often a bottleneck
mountainriver 1y ago
There have been plenty of studies showing the opposite. Also a sample size of 16 ain’t much
luc_ 1y ago
We're choosing to offload processing that our brain could be doing but we're too lazy to do it or the perceived value for us to do it is. I think there are consequences to this especially as we give the machine free information of how we twist and turn it into actually understanding what we mean. Interesting to consider that if our first vibecode prompt isn't what we actually want; it can train on how we direct it further. Offloading human intelligence is useful but... we're losing something.
- Fade_Dance 1y ago
  The majority of people seem to offload most of their thinking as is, and actively avoid things like critical thinking, confronting their own biases, seeking push-back against their own beliefs, etc. As with many other technologies, AI can be an enabler of this, or it can be used as a tool to empower and enhance learning and personal growth. That ultimately depends on the human to decide. One can dramatically accelerate personal and professional growth using these tools. Admittedly the degree to which one can offload tasks is greatly increased with this iteration, to the extent that at times you can almost seem like offloading your own autonomy. But many people already exist in this state, exclusively parroting other people's opinions without examining them, etc.
  - luc_ 1y ago
    Yeah real talk. It can really play to folks bias towards laziness and the fact that it's being controlled by corporations / (the few) / (the ultra-wealthy) should give us pause to consider the level of control it does and will influence over the majority of people...
itake 1y ago
I think its Apples to Oranges. The performance gains come from being able to ask specific questions about problems I deal with and (basically) have a staff engineer that I can bounce ideas off of. I am way faster at writing tasks on problems I am familiar with vs an AI. But me trying to figure out the database I should deeply look at for my usecase or debug android code when I don't know kotlin has saved me 5000x time.
dmackerman 1y ago
The thing is, most programming is mundane. Rename files, move them, make sure imports are correct, make sure builds pass...AI can do all of these with very high accuracy (most of the time).

jasonsb 1y ago

Objectively. I’m now tackling tasks I wouldn’t have even considered two or three years ago, but the biggest breakthrough has been overcoming procrastination. When AI handles over 50% of the work, there’s a 90% chance I’ll finish the entire task faster than it would normally take me just to get started on something new.

svachalek 1y ago
I don't think it's helped me do anything I couldn't do, in fact I've learned it's far easier to do hard things myself than trying to prompt an AI out of the ditches it will dig trying to do it. But I also find it's great for getting painful and annoying tasks out of the way that I really can't motivate to do myself.
- wiml 1y ago
  I think there might be cases, for some people or some tasks, where the difficulty of filling in a blank page is greater than the difficulty of fixing an entire page of errors. Even if you have to do all the same mental work, it feels like a different category of work.
- cheema33 1y ago
  > I don't think it's helped me do anything I couldn't do I am seeing a pattern here. It appears that AI isn't for everyone. Not everyone's personality may be a good fit for using AI. Just like not everybody is a good candidate for being a software dev, or police officer etc. I used to think that it is a tool. Like a car is. Everybody would want one. But that appears not be the case. For me, I used AI every day as a tool, for work and and home tasks. It is a massive help for me.
  - noobly 1y ago
    It’s weird how divisive it is. For me it’s completely dependent on the quality of the output. Lately, it’s been more of a hinderance.
  - majormajor 1y ago
    What home tasks do you use it for? It's hard for me to imagine many. It's not doing the dishes or watering the plants. If I wanted to rearrange the room I could have it mock up some images, I guess...
    - joemazerino 1y ago
      Figuring out which fertilizer, how often to water and sun placement for the plants is a useful AI request.
      - ht_th 1y ago
        Is it? It'll take a while for fertilizer and sun placement to take visually effect, and there's risk that short term effects aren't indicative of long term effects. How can you verify the recommendations are sound, valid, safe, complete, etc., without trying them out? And trying out unsound, invalid, unsafe, incomplete, etc., recommendations might result in dead plants in a couple of weeks.
        lithocarpus 1y ago
        Eh, for something like this the cost of it being wrong might be pretty small, but I'd bet odds are good that its recommendations will be better than whatever I might randomly come up with without doing any research. And I don't have the time to do the research on normal old google where it's really hard to find exactly what I want. I've found it immensely helpful for giving real world recommendations about things like this, that I know how to find on my own but don't have the time to do all the reading and synthesizing.
        Dilettante_ 1y ago
        I personally use chatgpt for initial discovery on these sorts of problems, maybe ask a probing question or two and then go back to traditional search engines to get a very rough second opinion(which might also lead to another round of questions). By the end of that process I'll either have seen that the llm is not helpful for that particular problem, or have an answer that I'm "reasonably confident" is "good enough" to use for something medium to low risk like potentially killing a plant. And I got there within 10-20 minutes, half of that being me just reading the 'bots summary.
- serpix 1y ago
  A very good tip: you get one chance to prompt them to a new path failing that clear the context and start again from the current premise. Use only actionable prompts, negations don't work on ai and they don't work on people.
agency 1y ago
> I’m now tackling tasks I wouldn’t have even considered two or three years ago Ok, so subjective
- dotslashmain 1y ago
  any objective measure of "productivity" (when it comes to knowledge work) is, when you dig down into it enough, ultimately subjective.
- moralestapia 1y ago
  "Not done" vs "Done" is as objective as it gets.
  - miyoji 1y ago
    You obviously have never worked a company that spends time arguing about the "definition of done". It's one of the most subjective topics I know about.
    - vorticalbox 1y ago
      At work we call this scope creep.
    - fbxio 1y ago
      It removes ambiguity. Everyone knows when work is truly considered done, avoiding rework, surprises, and finger-pointing down the line.
    - ycombigators 1y ago
      Sounds like a company is not adequately defining what the deliverables are. Task: Walk to the shops & buy some milk. Deliverables: 1. Video of walking to the shops (including capturing the newspaper for that day at the local shop) 2. Reciept from local store for milk. 3. Physical bottle of Milk.
      - tbossanova 1y ago
kenjackson 1y ago
This. I had this long standing dispute that I just never had the energy to look up what needed to be done to resolve it. I just told it to ChatGPT and it generated everything -- including the emails I needed to send and who to send them to. Two weeks later and it was taken care of. I had sat on it for literally 3 months until then. If I could have something that said, "Here are some things that it looks like you're procrastinating on -- do you want me to get started on them for you?" -- that would probably be crazy useful.
- meowface 1y ago
  Exactly. Agentic LLMs are amazing for people who suffer from chronic akrasia.
  - rosstex 1y ago
    OH wow, a word to describe me
    - _9ptr 1y ago
      The latin word for that is "incontinentia".
  - latexr 1y ago
    Those are exactly the people who shouldn’t use these tools. They’ll be sucked in to whatever bullshit the LLM peddles them and become unable to leave.
    - meowface 1y ago
      As long as it's helping them be productive, I don't really see an issue with that. Going from doing nothing to doing something is a net boost.
      - latexr 1y ago
        But it’s not helping them “be productive” (which is a horrible metric anyway, life is not about productivity above everything else), it’s sucking their lives and severing their relationships and connection to the real world. https://archive.ph/20250924025805/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/08/technology/ai-chatbots-delusions-chatgpt.html https://archive.ph/20250924025805/https://www.nytimes.com/20... https://archive.is/26aHF https://archive.is/26aHF
OtherShrezzing 1y ago
> I’m now tackling tasks I wouldn’t have even considered two or three years ago Could you give some examples, and an indication of your level of experience in the domains? The statement has a much different meaning if you were a junior developer 2 years ago versus a staff engineer.
- PeterFBell 1y ago
  I have been coding on and off (more off than on) for 47 years. I kinda stopped paying attention when we got past jquery and was never a fan of prototypical inheritance. Never built anything with tailwind, Next.js, etc. After spending some time writing copy, user stories and a design brief (all iterative with ChatGPT) cursor one shot my (simple) web app and I was live (once I'd spent a couple hours documenting my requirements and writing my copy) in 20 minutes of vibe coding. I've been adding small features in a language I don't program in using libraries I'm not familiar with thhat meet my modest functional requirements in a couple minutes each. I work with an LLM to refine my prompt, put it into cursor, run the app locally, look at the diffs, commit, push and I'm live on vercel within a minute or two. I don't have any good metrics for productivity, so I'm 100% subjective but I can say that even if I'd been building in Rails (it's been ~4 years but I coded in it for a decade) it would have taken me at least 8 hours to have an app where I was happy with both the functionality and the look and feel so a 10x improvement in productivity for that task feels about right. And having a "buddy" I can discuss a project with makes activation energy lower allowing me to complete more. Also, YC videos I don't have the time to watch, I get a transcript, feed into chatGTP, ask for the key take aways I could apply to my business (it's in a project where it has context on stage, industry, maturity, business goals, key challenges, etc) so I get the benefits of 90 minutes of listening plus maybe 15 minutes of summarizing, reviewing and synthesis in typically 5-6 minutes - and it'd be quicker if I built a pipeline (something I'm vibe coding next month) Wouldn't want to do business without it.
  - majormajor 1y ago
    How do you deal with security for web stuff? I wouldn't host anything vibe-coded publicly because I'm not enough of an expert in web/frontend to even double-check that it's not generating some giant holes.
stavros 1y ago
Same. It takes the drudgery out of creating, so I can at least start the projects. Then I can go down into the detail just enough that the AI doesn't produce crap, but without needing to write the actual writes of code myself. Hell, in the past few days I started making something to help me write documents for work (https://www.writelucid.cc https://www.writelucid.cc) and a viewer for all my blood tests (https://github.com/skorokithakis/bt-viewer https://github.com/skorokithakis/bt-viewer), and I don't think I would have made either without an LLM.
- lxgr 1y ago
  Same here. I’ve single-shot created a few Raycast plugins for TLV decoding that save me several seconds to a few minutes per task which I use almost daily at work. Would have never done that without LLMs.
ryukoposting 1y ago
What tasks is it doing 50% of the work on for you?
- evilduck 1y ago
  Not who you asked, but I upgraded NextJS in a couple of repos by just telling Claude Code to do it. I've had it swap out and upgrade libraries successfully in one shot too. It will usually create good enough Page Objects for E2Es and scaffold out the test file, which speeds up the development process a bit. Same for upgrading Node versions in some Lambda projects, just tell it to go and come back later. Instruct it to run the test and build steps and it's also like having a mini CI system running too. Personally, I think it really shines at doing the boring maintenance and tech debt work. None of these are hard or complex tasks but they all take up time and for a buck or two in tokens I can have it doing simple but tedious things while I'm working on something else.
  - ryukoposting 1y ago
    > Personally, I think it really shines at doing the boring maintenance and tech debt work. It shines at doing the boring maintenance and tech debt work for web. My experiences with it, as a firmware dev, have been the diametric opposite of yours. The only model I've had any luck with as an agent is Sonnet 4 in reasoning mode. At an absolutely glacial pace, it will sometimes write some almost-correct unit tests. This is only valuable because I can have it to do that while I'm in a meeting or reading emails. The only reason I use it at all is because it's coming out of my company's pocket, not mine.
    - evilduck 1y ago
      For sure. There's tons of training data in the models for the JS and TS language and the specific tasks I outlined, but not specifically just the web, I have several Node or Bun + Typescript + SQLite CLI utilities that it also helps with. I definitely pick my battles and lean in to what it works best for though. Anything it appears to struggle at I'll just do manually and develop it like we always did. It's rarely not a net positive to me but it's very frequently a negligible improvement. Anything that doesn't pay off in spades I typically don't try again until new models release or new tools or approaches are available.
calrain 1y ago
My programming productivity has improved a lot with Claude Code. One thing I've noticed is that I don't have a circle of people where I can discus programming with, and having an LLM to answer questions and wireframe up code has been amazing. My job doesn't require programming, but programming makes my job much easier, and the benefits have been great.
scragz 1y ago
there's some minority that's in the venn diagram of being good at programming, being good at AI, then also being good at using AI for programming (which is mostly project management), and if everything aligns then there are superhuman productivity gains. I'm tackling projects solo I never would have even attempted before but I could see people getting bad results and giving up.
- serpix 1y ago
  Same here! Started learning self hosted k3s, with terraform and IaC and all the bells and whistles. I would never have had the energy to look up how to even get started. In three hours I have a cluster.
  - lelanthran 1y ago
    Doesn't sound like you learned it, sounds like it did it for you, using you as the tool. IOW, can you redo it by yourself? If you can't then you did not learn it.
    - sally_glance 1y ago
      Is that really a fair comparison? I think the amount of people who can memorize each and every configuration item is vanishingly small... even when I was bootstrapping k8s clusters before the dawn of LLMs I had to lookup current documentation and maybe some up to date tutorials. Knowing the abstract steps and tripwires yes, but details will always have to be looked up. If just not to miss any new developments.
      - lelanthran 1y ago
        > Is that really a fair comparison? Well, yes it is; you can't very well claim to have learned something if you are unable to do it.
        alvah 1y ago
scrollaway 1y ago
Incredible how many people here just don’t believe you because it doesn’t reflect their personal experience. I want to second your experience as I’ve had the same as well. Tackling SO many more tasks than before and at such a crazy pace. I’ve started entire businesses I wouldn’t have just because of AI. But at the same time, some people have weird blockers and just can’t use AI. I don’t know what it is about it - maybe it’s a mental block? Wrong frame of mind? It’s those same people who end up saying “I spend more time fighting the ai and refining prompts than I would on the end task”. I’m very curious what it is that actually causes this divide.
- billy99k 1y ago
  Now is a good time to use it to make money, before it gets to the point where everyone is using it. I've been using it for almost a year now, and it's definitely improved my productivity. I've reduced work that normally takes a few hours to 20 minutes. Where I work, my manager was going to hire a junior developer and ended up getting a pro subscription to Claude instead. I also think it will be a concern for that 50-something developer that gets laid off in the coming years, has no experience with AI, and then can't find a job because it's a requirement. My cousin was a 53 year old developer and got laid off two years ago. He looked for a job for 6 months and then ended up becoming an auto mechanic at half the salary, when his unemployment ran out. The problem is that he was the subject matter expert on old technology and virtually nobody uses it anymore.
fsloth 1y ago
”I’m now tackling tasks I wouldn’t have even considered two or three years ago” This. 100x this.

logicprog 1y ago

The design of that study is pretty bad, and as a result it doesn't end up actually showing what it claims to show / what people claim it does. https://www.fightforthehuman.com/are-developers-slowed-down-by-ai-evaluating-an-rct-and-what-it-tells-us-about-developer-productivity/ https://www.fightforthehuman.com/are-developers-slowed-down-...

singron 1y ago
I don't think there is anything factually wrong with this criticism, but it largely rehashes caveats that are already well explored in the original paper, which goes through unusual lengths to clearly explain many ways the study is flawed. The study gets so much attention since it's one of the few studies on the topic with this level of rigor on real-world scenarios, and it explains why previous studies or anecdotes may have claimed perceived increases in productivity even if there wasn't any actual increases. It clearly sets a standard that we can't just ask people if they felt more productive (or they need to feel massively more productive to clearly overcome this bias).
- logicprog 1y ago
  > it largely rehashes caveats that are already well explored in the original paper, which goes through unusual lengths to clearly explain many ways the study is flawed. ... The study gets so much attention since it's one of the few studies on the topic with this level of rigor on real-world scenarios, Yes, but most people don't seem aware of those caveats, and this is a good summary of them, and I think it does undercut the "level of rigour" of the study. Additionally, some of what the article points out is not explicitly acknowledged and connected by the study itself. For instance, if you actually split up the tasks by type, some tasks show a speed up and some show a slowdown, and the qualitative comments by developers about where they thought AI was good/bad aligned very well with which saw what results. Or (iirc) the fact that the task timing was per task, but developer's post hoc assessments were a prediction of how much they thought they were sped up on average across all tasks, meaning it's not really comparing the same things when comparing how developers felt vs how things actually went. Or the fact that developers were actually no less accurate in predicting times to task completion overall wrt to AI vs non-AI. > and it explains why previous studies or anecdotes may have claimed perceived increases in productivity even if there wasn't any actual increases. Framing it that way assumes as an already established fact that needs to be explained that AI does not provide more productivity Which actually demonstrates, inadvertently, why the study is so popular! People want it to be true, so even if the study is so chock full of caveats that it can't really prove that fact let alone explain it, people appeal to it anyway. > It clearly sets a standard that we can't just ask people if they felt more productive Like we do for literally every other technological tool we use in software? > (or they need to feel massively more productive to clearly overcome this bias). All of this assumes a definition of productivity that's based on time per work unit done, instead of perhaps the amount of effort required to get a unit of work done, or the extra time for testing, documentation, shoring up edge cases, polishing features, that better tools allow. Or the ability to overcome dread and procrastination that comes from dealing with rote, boilerplate tasks. AI makes me so much more productive that friends and my wife have commented on it explicitly without needing to be prompted, for a lot of reasons.

CuriouslyC 1y ago

If you want another data point, you can just look at my company github (https://github.com/orgs/sibyllinesoft/repositories https://github.com/orgs/sibyllinesoft/repositories). ~27 projects in the last 5 weeks, probably on the order of half a million lines of code, and multiple significant projects that are approaching ship readiness (I need to stop tuning algorithms and making stuff gorgeous and just fix installation/ensure cross platform is working, lol).

shafyy 1y ago
Lines of codes is not a measure of anything meaningful on its own. The mere fact that you suggest this as prove that you are more productive makes me think you are not.
- CuriouslyC 1y ago
  The SWE industry is eagerly awaiting your proposed accurate metric. I find that people who dismiss LoC out of hand without supplying better metrics tend to be low performers trying to run for cover.
  - oofbey 1y ago
    Loc is so easy to game. Reformat. Check in a notebook. Move things around. Pointless refactor. If nobody is watching loc, it’s generally a good metric. But as soon as people start valuing it, it becomes useless.
    - sebastiennight 1y ago
      See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law and, in the case of "Lines of code" as a metric: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect
  - dmamills 1y ago
    A metric I'd be interested in is the number of clients you can convince to use this slop.

jama211 1y ago

Not this again. That study had serious problems. But I’m not even going to argue about that. I want to raise something no one else seems to mention about AI in coding work. I do a lot of work now with AI that I used to code by hand, and if you told me I was 20% slower on average, I would say “that’s totally fine it’s still worth it” because the EFFORT level from my end feels so much less. It’s like, a robot vacuum might take way longer to clean the house than if I did it by hand sure. But I don’t regret the purchase, because I have to do so much less _work_. Coding work that I used to procrastinate about because it was tedious or painful I just breeze through now. I’m so much less burnt out week to week. I couldn’t care less if I’m slower at a specific task, my LIFE is way better now I have AI to assist me with my coding work, and that’s super valuable no matter what the study says. (Though I will say, I believe I have extremely good evidence that in my case I’m also more productive, averages are averages and I suspect many people are bad at using AI, but that’s an argument for another time).

blks 1y ago
Often someone’s personal productivity with AI means someone else have to dig through their piles of rubbish to review PR they committed. In your particular case it sounds like you’re rapidly loosing your developer skills, and enjoy that now you have to put less effort and think less.
- wussboy 1y ago
  We know that relying heavily on Google Maps makes you less able to navigate without Google Maps. I don't think there's research on this yet, but I would be stunned if the same process isn't at play here.
  - lukan 1y ago
    I know that I am better at navigating with google maps than average people, because I navigated for years without it (partly on purpose). I know when not to trust it. I know when to ignore recommendations on recalculated routes. Same with LLMs. I am better with it, because I know how to solve things without the help of it. I understand the problem space and the limitations. Also I understand how hype works and why they think they need it (investors money). In other words, no, just using google maps or ChatGPT does not make me dumb. Only using it and blindly trusting it would.

tunesmith 1y ago

Data point: I run a site where users submit a record. There was a request months ago to allow users to edit the record after submitting. I put it off because while it's an established pattern it touches a lot of things and I found it annoying busy work and thus low priority. So then gpt5-codex came out and allowed me to use it in codex cli with my existing member account. I asked it to support edit for that feature all the way through the backend with a pleasing UI that fit my theme. It one-shotted it in about ten minutes. I asked for one UI adjustment that I decided I liked better, another five minutes, and I reviewed and released it to prod within an hour. So, you know, months versus an hour.

paulryanrogers 1y ago
Is the hour really comparable to months spent not working on it?
- rpdillon 1y ago
  He's referring to the reality that AI helps you pick up and finish tasks that you otherwise would have put off. I see this all day every day with my side projects as well as security and customer escalations that come into my team. It's not that Giant Project X was done six times as fast. It's more like we were able to do six small but consequential bug fixes and security updates while we continued to push on the large feature.
- jama211 1y ago
  “If you make a machine that can wash the dishes in an hour, is that more productive than not doing the dishes for months?” - Yes! That’s the definition of productivity!! The dishes are getting done now and they weren’t before! lol

bozhark 1y ago

Yes, for me. Instead of getting overwhelmed doing to many things, I can offload a lot of menial and time-driven tasks Reviews are absolutely necessary but take less time than creation

jama211 1y ago
Exactly. Is HN full of old codgers demanding that we can’t possibly use a calculator because that might mean we’d lose the precious skill of how to use a slide rule? The old man energy in here is insane

james_marks 1y ago

Yesterday is a good example- in 2 days, I completed what I expected to be a week’s worth of heads-down coding. I had to take a walk and make all new goals. The right AI, good patterns in the codebase and 20 years of experience and it is wild how productive I can be. Compare that to a few years ago, when at the end of the week, it was the opposite.

al_be_back 1y ago
makes no sense. how are you comparing yesterday with a "a few years ago" ?

rpdillon 1y ago

My personal project output has gone up dramatically since I started using AI, because I can now use times of night where I'm otherwise too mentally tired, to work with AI to crank through a first draft of a change that I can then iterate on later. This has allowed me to start actually implementing side projects that I've had ideas about for years and build software for myself in a way I never could previously (at least not since I had kids). I know it's not some amazing GDP-improving miracle, but in my personal life it's been incredibly rewarding.

animex 1y ago
This, 1000x. I had a dozen domains and projects on the shelf for years and now 8 of them have significant active development. I've already deployed 2 sites to production. My github activity is lighting up like a Christmas tree.
boogieknite 1y ago
i find a lot of value in using it to give half baked ideas momentum. some sort of "shower thought" will occur to me for a personal project while im at work and ill prompt Claude code to analyze and demonstrate an implementation for review later on the other hand i believe my coworker may have taken it too far. it seems like productivity has significantly slipped. in my perception the approaches hes using are convoluted and have no useful outcome. im almost worried about him because his descriptions of what hes doing make no sense to me or my teammates. hes spending a lot of time on it. im considering telling him to chill out but who knows, maybe im just not as advanced a user as him? anyone have experience with this?
- r_lee 1y ago
  Do you mean like convoluted agentic stuff, markdown files etc? Or like AI delusion?
  - boogieknite 1y ago
    the former it started as an approach to a mass legacy code migration. sound idea with potential to save time. i followed along and understood his markdown and agent stuff for analyzing and porting legacy code i reviewed results which apply to my projects. results were mixed bag but i think it saved some time overall. but now i dont get where hes going with his ai aspirations my best attempt to understand is he wants to work entirely though chats, no writing code, and hes doing so by improving agents through chats. hes really swept up in the entire concept. i consider myself optimistic about ai but his enthusiasm feels misplaced its to the point where his work is slipping and management is asking him where his results are. were a small team and management isnt savvy enough to see hes getting NOTHING done and i wont sell him out. however if this is a known delusional pattern id like to address it and point to a definition and/or past cases so he can recognize the pattern and avoid trouble

yokoprime 1y ago

I'm objectively faster. Not necessarily if I'm working on a task I've done routinely for years, but when taking on new challenges I'm up and running much faster. A lot of it have to do with me offloading doing the basic research while allowing myself to be interrupted; it's not a problem that people reach out with urgent matters while I'm taking on a challenge I've only just started to build towards. Being able to correct the ai where I can tell it's making false assumptions or going off the rails helps speed things up

Kiro 1y ago

The "you only think you're more productive" argument is tiresome. Yes, I know for sure that I'm more productive. There's nothing uncertain about it. Does it lead to other problems? No doubt, but claiming my productivity gains are imaginary is not serious. I've seen a lot of people who previously touted that it doesn't work at all use that study as a way to move the goalpost and pretend they've been right all along.

m_fayer 1y ago
We’re being accused of false consciousness!
chrysoprace 1y ago
I would be interested to know how you measure your productivity gains though, in an objective way where you're not the victim of bias. I just recently had to rate whether I felt like I got more done by leaning more on Claude Code for a week to do a toy project and while I _feel_ like I was more productive, I was already biased to think so, and so I was a lot more careful with my answer, especially as I had to spend a considerable amount of time either reworking the generated code or throwing away several hours of work because it simply made things up.
- Kiro 1y ago
  It sounds like you're very productive without AI or that your perceived gains are pretty small. To me, it's such a stark contrast that asking how I measure it is like asking me to objectively verify that a car is faster than walking.
  - laserlight 1y ago
    “I'm eating fewer calories yet keep putting on weight.” There's a reason self-reported measures are questioned: they have been wildly off in different domains. Objectively verifying that a car is faster than walking is easy. When it's not easy to objectively prove something, then there are a lot that could go wrong, including the disagreements on the definition of what's being measured.

m_fayer 1y ago

It seems like the programming world is increasingly dividing into “LLMs for coding are at best marginally useful and produce huge tech debt” vs “LLMs are a game changing productivity boost”. I truly don’t know how to account for the discrepancy, I can imagine many possible explanations. But what really gets my goat is how political this debate is becoming. To the point that the productivity-camp, of which I’m a part, is being accused of deluding themselves. I get that OpenAI has big ethical issues. And that there’s a bubble. And that ai is damaging education. And that it may cause all sorts of economic dislocation. (I emphatically Do Not get the doomers, give me a break). But all those things don’t negate the simple fact that for many of us, LLMs are an amazing programming tool, and we’ve been around long enough to distinguish substance from illusion. I don’t need a study to confirm what’s right in front of me.

Sharlin 1y ago
I’d love to know whether and to what extent the people for which AI has been a huge boost are those who were already producing slop, and now they have AI that can produce that slop much faster.
- Eisenstein 1y ago
  By framing it in such a way you are making personal and it becomes less about defending the process of using AI and more about defending their integrity as a developer. You will not get anything useful when someone responds in that way, just a heated argument where they feel deeply insulted and act accordingly.
  - jama211 1y ago
    Well said
- jama211 1y ago
  Sheesh, how do you expect to be taken seriously when you sneer through gritted teeth like that? I work with many developers of varying skill levels, all of which use AI. The only ones who have attempted to turn in slop are ones that basically turned out that they can’t code at all and didn’t keep their job long. Those who know what they’re doing, use it as a TOOL. They carefully build, modify, review and test everything and usually write about half of it themselves and it meets our strict standards. Which you would know if you’d listened to what we’ve been telling you in good faith.

tomrod 1y ago

I'm not who you responded to. I see about a 40% to 60% speed up as a solution architect when I sit down to code and about a 20% speedup when building/experimenting with research artifacts (I write papers occasionally). I have always been a careful tester, so my UAT hasn't blown up out of proportion. The big issue I see is rust it generates code using 2023-recent conventions, though I understand there is some improvement in thst direction. Our hiring pipeline is changing dramatically as well, since the normal things a junior needs to know (code, syntax) is no longer as expensive. Joel Spolsky's mantra to higher curious people who get things done captures well the folks I find are growing well as juniors.

citizenkeen 1y ago

I have a very big hobby code project I’ve been working on for years. AI has not made me much more productive at work. I can only work on my hobby project when I’m tired after the kids go to bed. AI has made me 3x productive there because reviewing code is easier than architecting. I can sense if it’s bad, I have good tests, the requests are pretty manageable (make a new crud page for this DTO using app conventions). But at work where I’m fresh and tackling hard problems that are 50% business political will? If anything it slows me down.

jama211 1y ago
Bureaucracy is often a bottleneck

mountainriver 1y ago

There have been plenty of studies showing the opposite. Also a sample size of 16 ain’t much

luc_ 1y ago

We're choosing to offload processing that our brain could be doing but we're too lazy to do it or the perceived value for us to do it is. I think there are consequences to this especially as we give the machine free information of how we twist and turn it into actually understanding what we mean. Interesting to consider that if our first vibecode prompt isn't what we actually want; it can train on how we direct it further. Offloading human intelligence is useful but... we're losing something.

Fade_Dance 1y ago
The majority of people seem to offload most of their thinking as is, and actively avoid things like critical thinking, confronting their own biases, seeking push-back against their own beliefs, etc. As with many other technologies, AI can be an enabler of this, or it can be used as a tool to empower and enhance learning and personal growth. That ultimately depends on the human to decide. One can dramatically accelerate personal and professional growth using these tools. Admittedly the degree to which one can offload tasks is greatly increased with this iteration, to the extent that at times you can almost seem like offloading your own autonomy. But many people already exist in this state, exclusively parroting other people's opinions without examining them, etc.
- luc_ 1y ago
  Yeah real talk. It can really play to folks bias towards laziness and the fact that it's being controlled by corporations / (the few) / (the ultra-wealthy) should give us pause to consider the level of control it does and will influence over the majority of people...

itake 1y ago

I think its Apples to Oranges. The performance gains come from being able to ask specific questions about problems I deal with and (basically) have a staff engineer that I can bounce ideas off of. I am way faster at writing tasks on problems I am familiar with vs an AI. But me trying to figure out the database I should deeply look at for my usecase or debug android code when I don't know kotlin has saved me 5000x time.

dmackerman 1y ago

The thing is, most programming is mundane. Rename files, move them, make sure imports are correct, make sure builds pass...AI can do all of these with very high accuracy (most of the time).