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Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

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Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#2
A 26% productivity increase sounds inline with in my experience. I think one dimension they should explore is whether you're working with a new technology or one that you're already familiar with. AI helps me much more with languages/frameworks that I'm trying to learn.

Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#3

A 26% productivity increase sounds inline with in my experience. I think one dimension they should explore is whether you're working with a new technology or one that you're already familiar with. AI helps me much more with languages/frameworks that I'm trying to learn.

Maybe that's what the new vs experienced difference is indirectly capturing.

Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#4

A 26% productivity increase sounds inline with in my experience. I think one dimension they should explore is whether you're working with a new technology or one that you're already familiar with. AI helps me much more with languages/frameworks that I'm trying to learn.

That might be. It might also be a consequence of how flexible people at different stages in their career are.

I have seen mostly senior programmers argue why ai tools don't work. Juniors just use them without prejudice.

Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#5
I wonder if the study includes the technical debt that more experienced developers had to tackle after the less experienced devs have contributed their AI-driven efforts. Because my personal experience has involved a lot of that in one of the companies listed in the study.

Also, I've personally seen more interest in AI in devs that have little interest in technology, but a big interest in delivering. PMs love them though.

Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#6

A 26% productivity increase sounds inline with in my experience. I think one dimension they should explore is whether you're working with a new technology or one that you're already familiar with. AI helps me much more with languages/frameworks that I'm trying to learn.

Same impression here.

I've been using Cursor for around 10 days on a massive Ruby on Rails project (a stack I've been coding in for +13 years).

I didn't enjoy any productivity boost on top of what GitHub Copilot already gave me (which I'd estimate around the 25% mark).

However, for crafting a new project from scratch (empty folder) in, say, Node.js, it's uncanny; I can get an API serving requests from a OpenAPI schema (serving the OpenAPI schema via swagger) in ~5 minutes just by prompting.

Starting a project from scratch, for me at least, is rare, which probably means going back to Copilot and vanilla VSCode.

Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#7
I'm guiding a few and sometimes they write pretty good code with the help of GPT but then in meetings have trouble understanding and explaining things.

I think it's a big productivity boost, but also a chance that the learning rate might actually be significantly slower.

Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#8
post #6

A 26% productivity increase sounds inline with in my experience. I think one dimension they should explore is whether you're working with a new technology or one that you're already familiar with. AI helps me much more with languages/frameworks that I'm trying to learn.

Same impression here. I've been using Cursor for around 10 days on a massive Ruby on Rails project (a stack I've been coding in for +13 years). I didn't enjoy any productivity boost on top of what GitHub Copilot already gave me (which I'd estimate around the 25% mark). However, for crafting a new project from scratch (empty folder) in, say, Node.js, it's uncanny; I can get an API serving requests from a OpenAPI schem…

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Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#9

A 26% productivity increase sounds inline with in my experience. I think one dimension they should explore is whether you're working with a new technology or one that you're already familiar with. AI helps me much more with languages/frameworks that I'm trying to learn.

That might be. It might also be a consequence of how flexible people at different stages in their career are. I have seen mostly senior programmers argue why ai tools don't work. Juniors just use them without prejudice.

Flexible, or just that only juniors have real benefits

Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#10

A 26% productivity increase sounds inline with in my experience. I think one dimension they should explore is whether you're working with a new technology or one that you're already familiar with. AI helps me much more with languages/frameworks that I'm trying to learn.

That might be. It might also be a consequence of how flexible people at different stages in their career are. I have seen mostly senior programmers argue why ai tools don't work. Juniors just use them without prejudice.

I wish I could upvote this comment more than once. There does appear to be a prejudice with more senior programmers arguing why it cannot work, how they just cause more trouble, and other various complaints. The tools today are not perfect but they still amaze me at what is being accomplished, even a 10% gain is incredible for something that costs $10/month. I believe progress will be made in the space and the tooling in 5 years will be even better.
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