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"People using AI" had a meaningful change when they "joined the workforce" in 2025. We may not have gotten fully-autonomous employees, but human employees usin

"People using AI" had a meaningful change when they "joined the workforce" in 2025. We may not have gotten fully-autonomous employees, but human employees using AI are doing way more than they could before, both in depth and scale. Claude Code is basically a full-time "employee" on my (profitable) open source projects, but it's still a tool I use to do all the work. Claude Code is basically a full-time "employee" at my job, but it's still a tool I use to do all the work. My workload has shifted to high-level design decisions instead of writing the code, which is kind of exactly what would have happened if AI "joined the workforce" and I had a bunch of new hires under me. I do recognize this article is largely targeted at non-dev workforces though, where it _largely_ holds up but most of my friends outside of the tech world have either gotten new jobs thanks to increased capability through AI or have severely integrated AI into whatever workflows they're doing at work (again, as a tool) and are excelling compared to employees who don't utilize AI.

llmslave2 9mo ago
> human employees using AI are doing way more than they could before, both in depth and scale Funny how that doesn't show up in any productivity or economic metrics...
- 9rx 9mo ago
  Bit too soon to tell, no? Claude Code wasn't released until the latter half of Q2, offering little time for it to show up in those figures, and Q3 data is only preliminary right now. Moreover, it seems to be the pairing with Opus 4.5 that lends some credence to the claims. However, it was released in Q4. We won't have that data for quite a while. And like Claude Code, it came late in the quarter, so realistically we really need to wait on Q1 2026 figures, which hasn't happened yet and won't really start to appear until summertime and beyond. That said, I expect you are right that we won't see it show up. Even if we assume the claim is true in every way for some people, it only works for exceptional visionaries who were previously constrained by typing speed, which is a very, very, very small segment of the developer population. Any gains that small group realize will be an unrecognizable blip amid everything else. The vast majority of developers need all that typing time and more to have someone come up with their next steps. Reducing the typing time for them doesn't make them any more productive. They were never limited by typing speed in the first place.
  - Ianjit 9mo ago
    The productivity studies on software engineers directly don't show much of a productivity gain certainly nowhere near the 10x the frontier labs would like to claim. When including re-work of bugs in the AI generated code some studies find that AI has no positive impact on software developer productivity, and can even have a negative impact. The main problem with these studies are they are backward looking, so frontier labs can always claim the next model will be the one that delivers the promised productivity gains and displace human workers.
    - edanm 9mo ago
      > The productivity studies on software engineers directly don't show much of a productivity gain certainly nowhere near the 10x the frontier labs would like to claim. Which studies are you talking about? The last major study that I saw (that gained a lot of attention) was published half a year ago, and the study itself was conducted on developers using AI tools in 2024. The technology has improved so rapidly that this study is now close-to-meaningless.
      - Ianjit 9mo ago
        A few studies over different time frames: [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OzxYK2-qsI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OzxYK2-qsI [2] https://www.coderabbit.ai/blog/state-of-ai-vs-human-code-generation-report https://www.coderabbit.ai/blog/state-of-ai-vs-human-code-gen... [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvosMkuNxF8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvosMkuNxF8 [4] https://www.faros.ai/blog/ai-software-engineering https://www.faros.ai/blog/ai-software-engineering "The technology has improved so rapidly that this study is now close-to-meaningless." You could have said that anytime in the last 3 years, but the data has never shown it to be true. Is there data to show that the current gen models are so much better than the last gen models that the existing productivity data should be ignored? I don't think the coding benchmarks show a step change in capabilities, its generally dev vibes rather than a large change to measurements.
- agnosticmantis 9mo ago
  One would have to control for all the layoffs, tarrifs, interest rates etc too. On the other hand, people are working much harder today than 3 years ago (remember people not showing up to work and posting on TikTok about how little work did collecting paychecks from 2 different companies etc?) Just saying it's very hard to look at a time series and determine an effect size, even though politicians/CEOs like to claim ownership for growths.
blhack 9mo ago
Can you elaborate on this more? What would be a task you would use claude code for, and what would accomplishing the task look like?
rhubarbtree 9mo ago
Humans are doing a bit more, specifically around 20% more. AI generates output that must be thoroughly check for most software engineering purposes. If you’re not checking the output, then quality and accuracy must not matter. For quick prototyping that’s mostly true. Not for real engineering.
LunaSea 9mo ago
> Claude Code is basically a full-time "employee" on my (profitable) open source projects, What fulltime employee works for 30 minutes and then stops working for the next 5 hours and 30 minutes like Claude does?

llmslave2 9mo ago

> human employees using AI are doing way more than they could before, both in depth and scale Funny how that doesn't show up in any productivity or economic metrics...

9rx 9mo ago
Bit too soon to tell, no? Claude Code wasn't released until the latter half of Q2, offering little time for it to show up in those figures, and Q3 data is only preliminary right now. Moreover, it seems to be the pairing with Opus 4.5 that lends some credence to the claims. However, it was released in Q4. We won't have that data for quite a while. And like Claude Code, it came late in the quarter, so realistically we really need to wait on Q1 2026 figures, which hasn't happened yet and won't really start to appear until summertime and beyond. That said, I expect you are right that we won't see it show up. Even if we assume the claim is true in every way for some people, it only works for exceptional visionaries who were previously constrained by typing speed, which is a very, very, very small segment of the developer population. Any gains that small group realize will be an unrecognizable blip amid everything else. The vast majority of developers need all that typing time and more to have someone come up with their next steps. Reducing the typing time for them doesn't make them any more productive. They were never limited by typing speed in the first place.
- Ianjit 9mo ago
  The productivity studies on software engineers directly don't show much of a productivity gain certainly nowhere near the 10x the frontier labs would like to claim. When including re-work of bugs in the AI generated code some studies find that AI has no positive impact on software developer productivity, and can even have a negative impact. The main problem with these studies are they are backward looking, so frontier labs can always claim the next model will be the one that delivers the promised productivity gains and displace human workers.
  - edanm 9mo ago
    > The productivity studies on software engineers directly don't show much of a productivity gain certainly nowhere near the 10x the frontier labs would like to claim. Which studies are you talking about? The last major study that I saw (that gained a lot of attention) was published half a year ago, and the study itself was conducted on developers using AI tools in 2024. The technology has improved so rapidly that this study is now close-to-meaningless.
    - Ianjit 9mo ago
      A few studies over different time frames: [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OzxYK2-qsI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OzxYK2-qsI [2] https://www.coderabbit.ai/blog/state-of-ai-vs-human-code-generation-report https://www.coderabbit.ai/blog/state-of-ai-vs-human-code-gen... [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvosMkuNxF8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvosMkuNxF8 [4] https://www.faros.ai/blog/ai-software-engineering https://www.faros.ai/blog/ai-software-engineering "The technology has improved so rapidly that this study is now close-to-meaningless." You could have said that anytime in the last 3 years, but the data has never shown it to be true. Is there data to show that the current gen models are so much better than the last gen models that the existing productivity data should be ignored? I don't think the coding benchmarks show a step change in capabilities, its generally dev vibes rather than a large change to measurements.
agnosticmantis 9mo ago
One would have to control for all the layoffs, tarrifs, interest rates etc too. On the other hand, people are working much harder today than 3 years ago (remember people not showing up to work and posting on TikTok about how little work did collecting paychecks from 2 different companies etc?) Just saying it's very hard to look at a time series and determine an effect size, even though politicians/CEOs like to claim ownership for growths.

blhack 9mo ago

Can you elaborate on this more? What would be a task you would use claude code for, and what would accomplishing the task look like?

rhubarbtree 9mo ago

Humans are doing a bit more, specifically around 20% more. AI generates output that must be thoroughly check for most software engineering purposes. If you’re not checking the output, then quality and accuracy must not matter. For quick prototyping that’s mostly true. Not for real engineering.

LunaSea 9mo ago

> Claude Code is basically a full-time "employee" on my (profitable) open source projects, What fulltime employee works for 30 minutes and then stops working for the next 5 hours and 30 minutes like Claude does?