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AI coding tools can reduce productivity

secondthoughts.ai

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Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#61

Post by dchftcs »

jack_h wrote: post #44
moron4hire wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels like a parallel to the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. Recently, my company has been investigating AI tools for coding. I know this sounds very late to the game, but we're a DoD consultancy and one not traditional associated with software development. So, for most of the people in the company, they are very impressed with the AI's output. I, on the other hand, am a fairly recent addition to the company. I was sp…

Before the industrial revolution a cabinetmaker would spend a significant amount of time advancing from apprentice to journeyman to master using only hand tools. Now master cabinetmakers that only use hand tools are exceedingly rare, most furniture is made with power tools and a related but largely different skillset. When it comes to software the entire reason maintainability is a goal is because writing and improvi…

Maintainable software is also more maintainable by AI. The required standards may be a bit different, for example there may be less emphasis on white space styling, but, for example, complexity in the form of subtle connections between different parts of a system is a burden for both humans and AI. AI isn't magic, it still has to reason, it fails on complexity beyond its ability to reason, and maintainable code is one that is easier to reason with.

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#62

Post by leptons »

IX-103 wrote: post #14
moron4hire wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels like a parallel to the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. Recently, my company has been investigating AI tools for coding. I know this sounds very late to the game, but we're a DoD consultancy and one not traditional associated with software development. So, for most of the people in the company, they are very impressed with the AI's output. I, on the other hand, am a fairly recent addition to the company. I was sp…

Well, that's what you'd expect from an LLM. They're not designed to give you the best solution. They're designed to give you the most likely solution. Which means that the results would be expected to be average, as "above average" solutions are unlikely by definition. You can tweak the prompt a bit to skew the probability distribution with careful prompting (LLMs that are told to claim to be math PHDs are better at…

I have no doubt which way it is going to go.

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#63

Post by zsoltkacsandi »

calrain wrote: post #57

I've been using Claude Code heavily for about 3 months now, and I'm pretty sure I'm between 10 and 20 times more productive while using it. How I measure performance is how many features I can implement in a given period of time. It's nice that people have done studies and have opinions, but for me, it's 10x to 20x better.

I have exactly the same experience.

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#64

Post by benreesman »

calrain wrote: post #57

I've been using Claude Code heavily for about 3 months now, and I'm pretty sure I'm between 10 and 20 times more productive while using it. How I measure performance is how many features I can implement in a given period of time. It's nice that people have done studies and have opinions, but for me, it's 10x to 20x better.

I find the swings to be wild, when you win with it, you win really big. But when you lose with it, it's a real bite out of your week too. And I think 10x to 20x has to be figurative right, you can do 20x by volume maybe, but to borrow an expression from Steve Ballmer, that's like measuring an airplane by kilograms.

Someone already operating at the very limit of their abilities doing stuff that is for them high complexity, high cognitive load, detail intense, and tactically non-obvious? Even a machine that just handed you the perfect code can't 20x your real output, even if it gave you the source file at 20x your native sophistication you wouldn't be able to build and deploy it, let alone make changes to it.

But even if it's the last 5-20% after you're already operating at your very limit and trying to hit your limit every single day is massive, it makes a bunch of stuff on the bubble go from "not realistic" to "we did that".

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#66

Post by bluefirebrand »

CaptainFever wrote: post #25
hluska wrote: post #20

I’ve been around tech for a long time. At this point, I’ve lost count of how many hype cycles I’ve seen hit the “hold on, everything sucks” stage. Generative AI is seemingly at the hold on, everything sucks stage and it’s getting repetitive.

Trough of Disillusionment (followed by the Slope of Enlightenment and Plateau of Productivity): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle

My bold prediction is that the Trough of Disillusionment for LLMs is going to be a very long stretch

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#67

Post by calrain »

benreesman wrote: post #64
calrain wrote: post #57

I've been using Claude Code heavily for about 3 months now, and I'm pretty sure I'm between 10 and 20 times more productive while using it. How I measure performance is how many features I can implement in a given period of time. It's nice that people have done studies and have opinions, but for me, it's 10x to 20x better.

I find the swings to be wild, when you win with it, you win really big. But when you lose with it, it's a real bite out of your week too. And I think 10x to 20x has to be figurative right, you can do 20x by volume maybe, but to borrow an expression from Steve Ballmer, that's like measuring an airplane by kilograms. Someone already operating at the very limit of their abilities doing stuff that is for them high comple…

There are definitely swings. Last night it took about 2 hours to get Monaco into my webpack built bootstrap template, it came down to CSS being mishandled and Claude couldn't see the light. I just pasted the code into ChatGPT o3 and it fixed it first try. I pasted the output of ChatGPT into Claude and viola, all done.

A key skill is to sense when the AI is starting to guess for solutions (no different to human devs) and then either lean into another AI or reset context and start over.

I'm finding the code quality increase greatly with the addition of the text 'and please follow best practices because will be pen tested on this!' and wow.. it takes it much more seriously.

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#68

Post by StefanBatory »

journal wrote: post #34
tomcam wrote: post #16

What bothers me more than any of this particular discussion is that we seem to be incapable of determining programmer productivity in a meaningful way since my debut as a programmer 40 years ago.

what about the $ you make? isn't that an indicator? you've probably made more than me, so you are more successful while both of us might be doing the same thing.

Is DB2 Admin more productive than Java dev on the same seniority?

What about countries? In my Poland $25k would be an amazing salary for a senior while in USA fresh grads can earn $80k. Are they more productive?

... at the same time, given same seniority, job and location - I'd be willing to say it wouldn't be a bad heuristic.

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#69

Post by georgemcbay »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #15

As others probably have experienced, I can only add that I am doing coding now I would have kicked down the road if I did not have LLM assistance. Example: using LeafletJS — not hard, but I didn't want to have to search all over to figure out how to use it. Example: other web page development requiring dropping image files, complicated scrolling, split-views, etc. In short, there are projects I have put off in the pa…

This is pretty similar to my own experience using LLMs as a tool.

When I'm working with platforms/languages/frameworks I am already deeply familiar with I don't think they save me much time at all. When I've tried to use them in this context they seem to save me a bunch of time in some situations, but also cost me a bunch of time in others resulting in basically a wash as far as time saved goes.

And for me a wash isn't worth the long-term cost of losing touch with the code by not being the one to have crafted it.

But when it comes to environments I'm not intimately familiar with they can provide a very easy on-ramp that is a much more pleasant experience than trying to figure things out through often iffy technical documentation or code samples.

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#70

Post by sph87 »

calrain wrote: post #57

I've been using Claude Code heavily for about 3 months now, and I'm pretty sure I'm between 10 and 20 times more productive while using it. How I measure performance is how many features I can implement in a given period of time. It's nice that people have done studies and have opinions, but for me, it's 10x to 20x better.

Where I have found Claude most helpful is on problems with very specific knowledge requirements.

Like: Why isn’t this working? Here Claude read this like 90 page PDF and tell me where I went wrong interfacing with this SDK.

Ohh I accidentally passed async_context_background_threading_safe instead of async_context_thread_safe_poll and it’s so now it’s panicking. Wow that would have taken me forever.

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