Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI coding tools can reduce productivity

secondthoughts.ai

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 284 posts

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#81

Post by jack_pp »

freetime2 wrote: post #5

Here is the the methodology of the study: > To directly measure the real-world impact of AI tools on software development, we recruited 16 experienced developers from large open-source repositories (averaging 22k+ stars and 1M+ lines of code) that they’ve contributed to for multiple years. Developers provide lists of real issues (246 total) that would be valuable to the repository—bug fixes, features, and refactors t…

I think the productivity gains most people rave about are stuff like, I wanted to do X which isn't hard if you are experienced with library Y and library Y is pretty popular and the LLM did it perfectly first try!

I think that's where you get 10-20x. When you're working on niche stuff it's either not gonna work or work poorly.

For example right now I need to figure out why an ffmpeg filter doesn't do X thing smoothly, even though the C code is tiny for the filter and it's self contained.. Gemini refuses to add comments to the code. It just apologizes for not being able to add comments to 150 lines of code lol.

However for building an ffmpeg pipeline in python I was dumbfounded how fast I was prototyping stuff and building fairly complex filter chains which if I had to do by hand just by reading the docs it would've taken me a whole lot more time, effort and frustration but was a joy to figure out with Gemini.

So going back to the study, IMO it's flawed because by definition working on new features for open source projects wouldn't be the bread and butter of LLMs however most people aren't working on stuff like this, they're rewriting the same code that 10000 other people have written but with their own tiny little twist or whatever.

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#82

Post by baq »

jack_pp wrote: post #74
benreesman wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Let's be serious, what percentage of devs are doing "high complexity, high cognitive load, detail intense" work?

All of them, some just don’t notice, don’t care or don’t know this line of work is like that. Look at how junior devs work vs really experienced, self-aware engineers. The latter routinely solve problems the former didn’t know existed.

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#83

Post by baq »

gtsop wrote: post #80
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 cringe when I see these numbers. 20 times better means that you can accomplish in two months what you would do in 4 years, which is ridiculus when said out loud. We can make it even more ridiculous by pointing out you would do in 3 years the work of working lifetime (60 years) I am wondering, what sort of tasks are you seeing these x20 boost?

It isn’t ridiculous, it’s easily true, especially when you’re experienced in general, but have little to no knowledge of this particular big piece of tech, like say you’ve stopped doing frontend when jquery was all there was and you’re coming back. I’m doing things with react in hours I would have no business doing in weeks a couple years ago.

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#84

Post by jack_pp »

baq wrote: post #82
jack_pp wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's be serious, what percentage of devs are doing "high complexity, high cognitive load, detail intense" work?

All of them, some just don’t notice, don’t care or don’t know this line of work is like that. Look at how junior devs work vs really experienced, self-aware engineers. The latter routinely solve problems the former didn’t know existed.

What does being experienced in a field of work have to do with self awareness?

Also I disagree. For web dev atleast, most people are just rewriting the same stuff in a different order. Even though the entire project might be complex from a high level perspective, when you dive into the components or even just a single route it ain't "high complexity" at all and since I believe most jobs are in web / app dev which just recycles the same code over and over again that's why there's a lot of people claiming huge boosts to productivity.

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#85

Post by congaliminal »

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.

You're getting 6 months worth of work done in a week?

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#87

Post by cluckindan »

calrain wrote: post #67
benreesman wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)…

Is there a way to have two agentic AIs do pair programming?

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#88

Post by calrain »

gtsop wrote: post #80
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 cringe when I see these numbers. 20 times better means that you can accomplish in two months what you would do in 4 years, which is ridiculus when said out loud. We can make it even more ridiculous by pointing out you would do in 3 years the work of working lifetime (60 years) I am wondering, what sort of tasks are you seeing these x20 boost?

It is amazing, cringe all you want :)

I scoped out a body of work and even with the AI assisting on building cards and feature documentation, it came to about 2 to 4 weeks to implement.

It was done in 2 days.

The key I've found with working as fast as possible is to have planning sessions with Claude Code and make it challenge you and ask tons of questions. Then get it to break the work into 'cards' (think Jira, but they are just .md files in your repo) and then maintain a todo.md and done.md file pair that sorts and organizes work flow.

Then start a new context, tell it to review todo.md and pick up next task, and burn through it, when done, commit and update todo.md and done.md, /compact and you're off on the next.

It's more than AI hinting at what to do, it's a whole new way of working with rigor and structure around it. Then you just focus fire on the next card, and the next, and if you ever think up new features, then card it up and put it in the work queue.

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#89

Post by shinycode »

congaliminal wrote: post #85
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.

You're getting 6 months worth of work done in a week?

I bet with a co-worker that a migration from angular 15 to angular 19 could be done really fast avoiding months. I spent a whole evening on it and Claude code have never been able to pull off a migration from 15 to 16 on its own. A total waste of time and nothing worked. I had the surprise that it cost me 275$ for nothing. So maybe for greenfield projects it’s smooth and saves time but it’s not a silver bullet on projects with problems.

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#90

Post by TeMPOraL »

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…

> 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?

When you zoom in, even this kind of work isn't uniform - a lot of it is still shaving yaks, boring chores, and tasks that are hard dependencies for the work that is truly cognitively demanding, but themselves are easy(ish) annoyances. It's those subtasks - and the extra burden of mentally keeping track of them - that sets the limit of what even the most skilled, productive engineer can do. Offloading some of that to AI lets one free some mental capacity for work that actually benefits from that.

> 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.

Not true if you use it right.

You're probably following the "grug developer" philosophy, as it's popular these days (as well as "but think of the juniors!", which is the perceived ideal in the current zeitgeist). By design, this turns coding into boring, low-cognitive-load work. Reviewing such code is, thus, easier (and less demoralizing) than writing it.

20x is probably a bit much across the board, but for the technical part, I can believe it - there's too much unavoidable but trivial bullshit involved in software these days (build scripts, Dockerfies, IaaS). Preventing deep context switching on those is a big time saver.

Post reply on HN