4 ms·

AI saves about 3% of your hours, and almost none of it reaches the money

77 points by ermantrout 3mo ago

deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
_pdp_ 3mo ago
Saving time does not automatically translate into higher productivity, or even lower costs. That should be obvious? In fact, I would argue the that with AI, companies should expect to spend more on average, without necessarily seeing any meaningful cost savings nor increase in profits. That does not mean they can escape this though. It is just like paying for ads, backlinks etc.
- eslaught 3mo ago
  In what sense is AI like paying for ads? In one case you legitimately lose to the competition if you stop (prisoner's dilemma). In other case, whether and how much you lose depends almost entirely on how much it actually impacts your productivity in practice (or not). If you're referring to the public perception benefits (supposing those even exist, which isn't clear to me), then it seems easy to make a lot of noise via PR while doing the minimal amount internally to explore the use case and not actually push it as hard as you say.
  - pianopatrick 3mo ago
    If we assume everyone has access to the same AI tools and those tools do help improve output a lot then you get the same prisoner's dilemma as ads. The people using the AI tools to improve their output will set higher consumer expectations for their product or service. If you do not also use AI, you will not be able to keep up, and so you will lose business over time. So you have to pay for AI just to keep up with the other people who pay for AI. But then if everyone is paying for and using AI to improve their product or service, no one can steal market share from each other. So you are all now paying a lot and AI is doing a lot and the buyers are getting better results, but that does not necessarily lead to better financial results in terms of market share, revenue, costs or profits for the business that is now using AI
    - eslaught 3mo ago
      If AI works the way you suggest then we've literally been here before and we know exactly how this goes. When tractors came along, farmers became dramatically more productive. Were the farmers who did things the old way "forced" to buy tractors in order to stay afloat? Over time, sure. But this was in no way zero-sum. More products made it to market (literally), more of the workforce was able to shift away from manual labor, and society became much better off overall. The people who moved to cities made dramatically more money, and the farmers who remained made more money too. Edit: this is literally on the front page right now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48775979 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48775979 This is not a prisoner's dilemma in any meaningful sense, unless you just like being inefficient and wasting a bunch of human effort. (I'm not convinced yet whether AI actually works this way or not. I'm just saying, if it works this way, the economic theory is well-developed and we can predict fairly accurately how it's going to play out.)
- uxhacker 3mo ago
  The article gives valid advice in using AI on tasks AI is good at, but the article could be clearer on is what AI is good at and what AI is not so good at.
killerstorm 3mo ago
That study is a weird kind of bullshit which pretends to not understand employer-employee relationship.
- ermantrout 3mo ago
  [dead]
peter422 3mo ago
A year ago AI wrote roughly 0% of my code and now it writes roughly 100%. Which is to say any AI study from a year ago is fairly out of date with the speed of advancement.
- joe_the_user 3mo ago
  The study is two months old (March 13, 2026). Edit: Also, it's about writing not coding and it's point isn't that time isn't saved but even with time saved at the task, you don't get a broad decrease in total worked time for many/most workers.
  - mythrwy 3mo ago
    Right but it looks back well before that.
  - strangescript 3mo ago
    The study is "new", but the data they are using is old. It has references GPT-4 for god sake.
  - czinck 3mo ago
    The study was published in May 2025, and then revised in March 2026. It's based on data through December 2024, so virtually useless for saying anything about today. Given that, I actually think the conclusions of the article are backwards. If the gpt-4/gpt-4o era had a measurable 3% improvement in productivity, how much more improvement are we getting from models today that are way way better?
- steve1977 3mo ago
  But that itself doesn't tell us yet how much time it saved you at the end of the day.
  - SoftTalker 3mo ago
    As a developer, on my very best days I probably spent no more than 50% of my day actually writing code. So call it 4 hours of actual hands-on-keyboard coding. But AI can write code much faster than a human. In 4 hours it might be able to write what would have taken me a week. Or more. Assuming it had proper specifications for that volume of code.
chapel 3mo ago
Read the first paragraph could tell it was AI written. Maybe if it was hand edited to be less AI I would have read more but it looked like the laziest Claude prose. That'll be a no from me dawg.
- jmcgough 3mo ago
  Doesn't read like it's AI-written to me.
  - SoftTalker 3mo ago
    I'm 50:50 on it. It's either AI written or written by someone who writes like an LLM does.
  - yawnxyz 3mo ago
    there's plenty of tells, e.g. "how to actually bank the part that is real" — AI tends to just "throw words out there" with very little information density you COULD create a writer/reviewer loop hook to catch and rewrite sentences like this, but almost no one does the result is usually very long essays that say very little (kind of like in grade school where we're graded on "length" so we just add words as filler)
  - linkregister 3mo ago
    It's been heavily edited to reduce its AI-ness. Some tells remain, for example "Not X. It's Y." Enough smell has been removed where it's tolerable.
- insane_dreamer 3mo ago
  I think we have to accept that most/all prose in the future will either be AI written or AI edited at least. Fine so long as the content checks out (!important). I'm not reading it for its artistic or human value.
lazzlazzlazz 3mo ago
Just embarrassing to believe a study like this right now.
- nok22kon 3mo ago
  plot twist: the vast majority of "studies" are like this, complete garbage, but called "science" because they put a table with p-values in
kstenerud 3mo ago
Calling bullshit on this. The size of projects I've done in the past year compared to before is mind boggling. There is NO way I could have reached this level of productivity without a properly trained and properly prompted LLM.
- mythrwy 3mo ago
  I notice the study is "in the past" when models weren't as good and also it appears to focus on office workers writing text. Ya, using AI to write your emails isn't that huge of a time savings. But coding is different matter.
- shimman 3mo ago
  Can you say what exactly you've accomplished with this productivity? Can you provide revenue numbers and how profit increased or does your definition of productivity not include this?
  - kstenerud 3mo ago
    Hell no. I want you to doubt. More for me.
- suddenlybananas 3mo ago
  Like what
  - slopinthebag 3mo ago
    Their tool for sandboxing AI agents, probably.
  - surgical_fire 3mo ago
    You will never get an answer.
- ermantrout 3mo ago
  [flagged]
skybrian 3mo ago
This article looks AI-written but I doubt it increased anyone’s paycheck. I wouldn’t expect productivity to increase paychecks all that quickly except in special cases like that memory factory in South Korea. Higher productivity sometimes eventually results in more revenue and some companies competing for better workers by offering higher salaries (as has happened for software engineers), but this takes time and depends on companies believing that hiring better workers benefits them. We aren’t really seeing that yet. We are seeing layoffs and companies being cautious about hiring. If it happens at all, it will take time.
Notfrontier 3mo ago
Citing a paper from 2023 and calling it frontier, nah
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
hackmack10 3mo ago
This article is probably not accurate. AI allows me to create hugely complex apps. Apps that I mostly don't understand the underlying code but can evaluate that it works fairly quick and effectively. That said, in the corporate world, it's not that easy. There are tons of hoops to jump through and context switching all day long. So while my code is 100% AI generated these days, and I can make extremely complicated apps quickly at home, at work however, I'm burned out and completely checked out for the most part, entirely due to AI. We don't have the same capabilities to burn tokens in the corporate world like we do at home. We don't have the creative freedoms we have at home. AI productivity is just not easily measured.
- jmcgough 3mo ago
  This article isn't focused on LLM for code generation.
- badgersnake 3mo ago
  > Apps that I mostly don't understand the underlying code So you’re just flinging tokens at the wall until something sticks. That’s not engineering.
  - tonyhart7 3mo ago
    You be surprise if people didnt do that
    - badgersnake 3mo ago
      I’m not surprised. Of course people take shortcuts. They did it before LLMs came around. If you don’t understand the output you don’t get to judge the quality.
  - hackmack10 3mo ago
    Honestly, more like being a CEO / CTO that manages a ton of agents and these dumb fucks go off the rails at times and have to be yelled at. It's like herding cats. I've created (AI) entire harness systems, Electron apps, mobile app, SaaS products, video games, MCP servers and more. Many of these things seem like they have the possibility of being their own products, but honestly, I'm just tired and burned out. I'm mostly building this stuff to remain relevant and prepared to pivot when the inevitable layoff comes. This layoff will come, for the same reason I'm able to create all this shit. CTO's and CEO's think this stuff will really work. What the C-Suite doesn't know is... this is a fucking disaster waiting to happen. At some point the realization will come, that you have no moat. You have no unique ideas. If you do, they are easily copied. You're also giving over your IP to a company that is losing a fuck ton of money and will keep raising their prices. Worst of all, nobody including yourself will understand what your code is doing or forgetting to do. I foresee a bleak future. I've had a decent amount of success in this industry. My plan is to ride this shit storm and see where it takes me, or do my best to help bring the entire system crashing down. By that, I mean, I'll release / contribute free and open source software, which mimics every business model that doesn't have a legal or financial moat. For instance... Slack, Miro, Shopify, the million AI wrapper products that are springing up every month etc.
aleqs 3mo ago
AI is a multiplier, not an optimizer. Engineers, (and many other types of specialists/professionals) can use it to speed up their work and increase output (even increase quality in some cases if done right). But it's not gonna make inherently inefficient, political, and corrupted internal/company processes any more efficient, it might actually multiply those existing inefficiencies.
apsec112 3mo ago
This is a 2024 survey, so it predates Claude Code and is mostly measuring GPT-4o: https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/BFI_WP_2025-56-4.pdf https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/BFI_WP_2...
Gagarin1917 3mo ago
>And in coding specifically, the speedup is real and comes with its own bill. Oh so this article isn’t really about where AI spending is actually happening. I HOPE people aren’t spending money on AI writing emails. That’s definitely not worth it. Companies are spending the most on coding tools, not email writing. That’s the main value proposition right now. It also doesn’t get into media generation and industries that use video or music. It’s just a really narrow look at probably the worst use case for AI. Useless.
- giancarlostoro 3mo ago
  I use AI to shorten my emails, I write as I talk, and I ramble a lot in my head.
  - Gagarin1917 3mo ago
    But surely the free version of any of the chatbots is enough to achieve that, right? You don’t need a Pro subscription for that.
    - giancarlostoro 3mo ago
      It's not the only use case for LLMs I have. I use local LLMs for some things.
- kenhwang 3mo ago
  > I HOPE people aren’t spending money on AI writing emails. That’s definitely not worth it. The engineers use the coding AI for everything they don't like to do that distracts them from doing what they like to do. So that's certainly a lot of writing emails, status updates, meeting notes, journaling, Slack messages, and prettifying slide presentations and so so so many docs. So if you're aghast that hundreds of dollars of AI tokens per engineer per month is being spent on writing emails, you should be even more offended that the more expensive human engineer time used to be wasted on those tasks.
- hn_throwaway_99 3mo ago
slopinthebag 3mo ago
> AI genuinely speeds up the right tasks: writing, support, structured drafts. Fascinating prose, implying that it’s possible that AI can inauthentically speed up the right tasks, which makes no sense at all. Good job Claude!
dionian 3mo ago
> But in the wild the gains shrink to about 3% of your hours not my experience at all
- chilipepperhott 3mo ago
  In research that studies a large enough population there will always be outliers. Maybe you are one of them. Your counterexample does not prove them wrong.
cuttothechase 3mo ago
3% of measurable gains is massive in itself isn't it? Taken as a percentage of the total volume of workforce and the world economy? If we can gain 3% across the board gains on AI based tasks without subsidized expenses, that would be a great win!?
- outside2344 3mo ago
  But is it a 3% gain if we include the costs? Or would it actually be cheaper to just hire humans with the money going to tokens?
  - graydsl 3mo ago
    And guess what humans even learn, get better and might bring more value in the future.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
devoncox 3mo ago
[flagged]
dfsfsdfsdfsd 3mo ago
Code isn't the bottleneck. Wait till devs find out making money is actually more work than just producing "systems".
OutOfHere 3mo ago
There are a large amount of anti-AI articles being posted on the HN front page. It is not natural. There is a clear conspiracy, but why, and who is orchestrating it?

77 points by ermantrout 3mo ago

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

_pdp_ 3mo ago

Saving time does not automatically translate into higher productivity, or even lower costs. That should be obvious? In fact, I would argue the that with AI, companies should expect to spend more on average, without necessarily seeing any meaningful cost savings nor increase in profits. That does not mean they can escape this though. It is just like paying for ads, backlinks etc.

eslaught 3mo ago
In what sense is AI like paying for ads? In one case you legitimately lose to the competition if you stop (prisoner's dilemma). In other case, whether and how much you lose depends almost entirely on how much it actually impacts your productivity in practice (or not). If you're referring to the public perception benefits (supposing those even exist, which isn't clear to me), then it seems easy to make a lot of noise via PR while doing the minimal amount internally to explore the use case and not actually push it as hard as you say.
- pianopatrick 3mo ago
  If we assume everyone has access to the same AI tools and those tools do help improve output a lot then you get the same prisoner's dilemma as ads. The people using the AI tools to improve their output will set higher consumer expectations for their product or service. If you do not also use AI, you will not be able to keep up, and so you will lose business over time. So you have to pay for AI just to keep up with the other people who pay for AI. But then if everyone is paying for and using AI to improve their product or service, no one can steal market share from each other. So you are all now paying a lot and AI is doing a lot and the buyers are getting better results, but that does not necessarily lead to better financial results in terms of market share, revenue, costs or profits for the business that is now using AI
  - eslaught 3mo ago
    If AI works the way you suggest then we've literally been here before and we know exactly how this goes. When tractors came along, farmers became dramatically more productive. Were the farmers who did things the old way "forced" to buy tractors in order to stay afloat? Over time, sure. But this was in no way zero-sum. More products made it to market (literally), more of the workforce was able to shift away from manual labor, and society became much better off overall. The people who moved to cities made dramatically more money, and the farmers who remained made more money too. Edit: this is literally on the front page right now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48775979 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48775979 This is not a prisoner's dilemma in any meaningful sense, unless you just like being inefficient and wasting a bunch of human effort. (I'm not convinced yet whether AI actually works this way or not. I'm just saying, if it works this way, the economic theory is well-developed and we can predict fairly accurately how it's going to play out.)
uxhacker 3mo ago
The article gives valid advice in using AI on tasks AI is good at, but the article could be clearer on is what AI is good at and what AI is not so good at.

killerstorm 3mo ago

That study is a weird kind of bullshit which pretends to not understand employer-employee relationship.

ermantrout 3mo ago
[dead]

peter422 3mo ago

A year ago AI wrote roughly 0% of my code and now it writes roughly 100%. Which is to say any AI study from a year ago is fairly out of date with the speed of advancement.

joe_the_user 3mo ago
The study is two months old (March 13, 2026). Edit: Also, it's about writing not coding and it's point isn't that time isn't saved but even with time saved at the task, you don't get a broad decrease in total worked time for many/most workers.
- mythrwy 3mo ago
  Right but it looks back well before that.
- strangescript 3mo ago
  The study is "new", but the data they are using is old. It has references GPT-4 for god sake.
- czinck 3mo ago
  The study was published in May 2025, and then revised in March 2026. It's based on data through December 2024, so virtually useless for saying anything about today. Given that, I actually think the conclusions of the article are backwards. If the gpt-4/gpt-4o era had a measurable 3% improvement in productivity, how much more improvement are we getting from models today that are way way better?
steve1977 3mo ago
But that itself doesn't tell us yet how much time it saved you at the end of the day.
- SoftTalker 3mo ago
  As a developer, on my very best days I probably spent no more than 50% of my day actually writing code. So call it 4 hours of actual hands-on-keyboard coding. But AI can write code much faster than a human. In 4 hours it might be able to write what would have taken me a week. Or more. Assuming it had proper specifications for that volume of code.

chapel 3mo ago

Read the first paragraph could tell it was AI written. Maybe if it was hand edited to be less AI I would have read more but it looked like the laziest Claude prose. That'll be a no from me dawg.

jmcgough 3mo ago
Doesn't read like it's AI-written to me.
- SoftTalker 3mo ago
  I'm 50:50 on it. It's either AI written or written by someone who writes like an LLM does.
- yawnxyz 3mo ago
  there's plenty of tells, e.g. "how to actually bank the part that is real" — AI tends to just "throw words out there" with very little information density you COULD create a writer/reviewer loop hook to catch and rewrite sentences like this, but almost no one does the result is usually very long essays that say very little (kind of like in grade school where we're graded on "length" so we just add words as filler)
- linkregister 3mo ago
  It's been heavily edited to reduce its AI-ness. Some tells remain, for example "Not X. It's Y." Enough smell has been removed where it's tolerable.
insane_dreamer 3mo ago
I think we have to accept that most/all prose in the future will either be AI written or AI edited at least. Fine so long as the content checks out (!important). I'm not reading it for its artistic or human value.

lazzlazzlazz 3mo ago

Just embarrassing to believe a study like this right now.

nok22kon 3mo ago
plot twist: the vast majority of "studies" are like this, complete garbage, but called "science" because they put a table with p-values in

kstenerud 3mo ago

Calling bullshit on this. The size of projects I've done in the past year compared to before is mind boggling. There is NO way I could have reached this level of productivity without a properly trained and properly prompted LLM.

mythrwy 3mo ago
I notice the study is "in the past" when models weren't as good and also it appears to focus on office workers writing text. Ya, using AI to write your emails isn't that huge of a time savings. But coding is different matter.
shimman 3mo ago
Can you say what exactly you've accomplished with this productivity? Can you provide revenue numbers and how profit increased or does your definition of productivity not include this?
- kstenerud 3mo ago
  Hell no. I want you to doubt. More for me.
suddenlybananas 3mo ago
Like what
- slopinthebag 3mo ago
  Their tool for sandboxing AI agents, probably.
- surgical_fire 3mo ago
  You will never get an answer.
ermantrout 3mo ago
[flagged]

skybrian 3mo ago

This article looks AI-written but I doubt it increased anyone’s paycheck. I wouldn’t expect productivity to increase paychecks all that quickly except in special cases like that memory factory in South Korea. Higher productivity sometimes eventually results in more revenue and some companies competing for better workers by offering higher salaries (as has happened for software engineers), but this takes time and depends on companies believing that hiring better workers benefits them. We aren’t really seeing that yet. We are seeing layoffs and companies being cautious about hiring. If it happens at all, it will take time.

Notfrontier 3mo ago

Citing a paper from 2023 and calling it frontier, nah

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

hackmack10 3mo ago

This article is probably not accurate. AI allows me to create hugely complex apps. Apps that I mostly don't understand the underlying code but can evaluate that it works fairly quick and effectively. That said, in the corporate world, it's not that easy. There are tons of hoops to jump through and context switching all day long. So while my code is 100% AI generated these days, and I can make extremely complicated apps quickly at home, at work however, I'm burned out and completely checked out for the most part, entirely due to AI. We don't have the same capabilities to burn tokens in the corporate world like we do at home. We don't have the creative freedoms we have at home. AI productivity is just not easily measured.

jmcgough 3mo ago
This article isn't focused on LLM for code generation.
badgersnake 3mo ago
> Apps that I mostly don't understand the underlying code So you’re just flinging tokens at the wall until something sticks. That’s not engineering.
- tonyhart7 3mo ago
  You be surprise if people didnt do that
  - badgersnake 3mo ago
    I’m not surprised. Of course people take shortcuts. They did it before LLMs came around. If you don’t understand the output you don’t get to judge the quality.
- hackmack10 3mo ago
  Honestly, more like being a CEO / CTO that manages a ton of agents and these dumb fucks go off the rails at times and have to be yelled at. It's like herding cats. I've created (AI) entire harness systems, Electron apps, mobile app, SaaS products, video games, MCP servers and more. Many of these things seem like they have the possibility of being their own products, but honestly, I'm just tired and burned out. I'm mostly building this stuff to remain relevant and prepared to pivot when the inevitable layoff comes. This layoff will come, for the same reason I'm able to create all this shit. CTO's and CEO's think this stuff will really work. What the C-Suite doesn't know is... this is a fucking disaster waiting to happen. At some point the realization will come, that you have no moat. You have no unique ideas. If you do, they are easily copied. You're also giving over your IP to a company that is losing a fuck ton of money and will keep raising their prices. Worst of all, nobody including yourself will understand what your code is doing or forgetting to do. I foresee a bleak future. I've had a decent amount of success in this industry. My plan is to ride this shit storm and see where it takes me, or do my best to help bring the entire system crashing down. By that, I mean, I'll release / contribute free and open source software, which mimics every business model that doesn't have a legal or financial moat. For instance... Slack, Miro, Shopify, the million AI wrapper products that are springing up every month etc.

aleqs 3mo ago

AI is a multiplier, not an optimizer. Engineers, (and many other types of specialists/professionals) can use it to speed up their work and increase output (even increase quality in some cases if done right). But it's not gonna make inherently inefficient, political, and corrupted internal/company processes any more efficient, it might actually multiply those existing inefficiencies.

apsec112 3mo ago

This is a 2024 survey, so it predates Claude Code and is mostly measuring GPT-4o: https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/BFI_WP_2025-56-4.pdf https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/BFI_WP_2...

Gagarin1917 3mo ago

>And in coding specifically, the speedup is real and comes with its own bill. Oh so this article isn’t really about where AI spending is actually happening. I HOPE people aren’t spending money on AI writing emails. That’s definitely not worth it. Companies are spending the most on coding tools, not email writing. That’s the main value proposition right now. It also doesn’t get into media generation and industries that use video or music. It’s just a really narrow look at probably the worst use case for AI. Useless.

giancarlostoro 3mo ago
I use AI to shorten my emails, I write as I talk, and I ramble a lot in my head.
- Gagarin1917 3mo ago
  But surely the free version of any of the chatbots is enough to achieve that, right? You don’t need a Pro subscription for that.
  - giancarlostoro 3mo ago
    It's not the only use case for LLMs I have. I use local LLMs for some things.
kenhwang 3mo ago
> I HOPE people aren’t spending money on AI writing emails. That’s definitely not worth it. The engineers use the coding AI for everything they don't like to do that distracts them from doing what they like to do. So that's certainly a lot of writing emails, status updates, meeting notes, journaling, Slack messages, and prettifying slide presentations and so so so many docs. So if you're aghast that hundreds of dollars of AI tokens per engineer per month is being spent on writing emails, you should be even more offended that the more expensive human engineer time used to be wasted on those tasks.
hn_throwaway_99 3mo ago

slopinthebag 3mo ago

> AI genuinely speeds up the right tasks: writing, support, structured drafts. Fascinating prose, implying that it’s possible that AI can inauthentically speed up the right tasks, which makes no sense at all. Good job Claude!

dionian 3mo ago

> But in the wild the gains shrink to about 3% of your hours not my experience at all

chilipepperhott 3mo ago
In research that studies a large enough population there will always be outliers. Maybe you are one of them. Your counterexample does not prove them wrong.

cuttothechase 3mo ago

3% of measurable gains is massive in itself isn't it? Taken as a percentage of the total volume of workforce and the world economy? If we can gain 3% across the board gains on AI based tasks without subsidized expenses, that would be a great win!?

outside2344 3mo ago
But is it a 3% gain if we include the costs? Or would it actually be cheaper to just hire humans with the money going to tokens?
- graydsl 3mo ago
  And guess what humans even learn, get better and might bring more value in the future.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]

devoncox 3mo ago

[flagged]

dfsfsdfsdfsd 3mo ago

Code isn't the bottleneck. Wait till devs find out making money is actually more work than just producing "systems".

OutOfHere 3mo ago

There are a large amount of anti-AI articles being posted on the HN front page. It is not natural. There is a clear conspiracy, but why, and who is orchestrating it?