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AI coding tools can reduce productivity

secondthoughts.ai

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Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#91

Post by tomcam »

jaredklewis wrote: post #55
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.

I’m confused as to why anyone would think this would be possible to determine. Like can we determine the productivity of doctors, lawyers, journalists, or pastry chefs? What job out there is so simple that we can meaningfully measure all the positive and negative effects of the worker as well as account for different conditions between workers. I could probably get behind the idea that you could measure productivity…

Duly upvoted! I tend to agree. Yet the shibboleth of productivity haunts us still.

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#92

Post by tomcam »

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.

Salary is an indirect and partially useful metric, but one could argue that your ability to self-promote matters more, at least in the USA. I worked at Microsoft and saw that some of the people who made fat stacks of cash, just happened to be at the right place in the right time, or promoted things that looked good, but we’re not good for the company itself.

I made great money running my own businesses, but the vast majority of the programming was by people I hired. I’m a decent talent, but that gave me the ability to hire better ones than me.

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#93

Post by nottorp »

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)…

Doesn't sound like you were writing actual functionality code, just integrating libraries?

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#94

Post by aitchnyu »

gpm wrote: post #27
raggi wrote: post #24

They averaged producing 47% more code on the AI tasks, but took only 20% more time. The report here biases over these considerations, but I’m left wondering: was the extra code superfluous or did this produce better structure / managed debt better? If that extra 47% of code translates to lower debt and more consistent throughput over the long term, I might take it, given how crushed projects get from debt. Anyway, it…

Honestly my experience from using AI to code (primarily claude sonnet) is that that "extra 47%" is probably itself mostly tech debt. Places where the AI repeated itself instead of using a loop. Places where the AI wrote tests that don't actually test anything. Places where the AI failed to produce a simple abstraction and instead just kept doing the same thing by hand. Etc. AI isn't very good at being concise, in my…

Can we have a linter for both high verbosity/repetitiveness and high terseness? I know copy-paste detector and cognitive complexity calculator linters are related. I recently generated code that interleaved spreadsheet worksheets (multiple of them) and cell formatting boilerplate with querying data. I asked AI to put the boilerplate into another class and expose .write_balance_row() and it did it perfectly. If a tool reported it, huge changes dont have to reach human reviewers and AIs can iterate and pass the linter.

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#95

Post by ido »

hammyhavoc wrote: post #41
xarope wrote: post #29

I think this for me is the most worrying: "You can see that for AI Allowed tasks, developers spent less time researching and writing code". My analogy to this is seeing people spend time trying to figure out how to change colors, draw shapes in powerpoint, rather than focus on the content and presentation. So here, we have developers now focusing their efforts on correcting the AI output, rather than doing the resear…

This has been my observation too. It's a tool for the lazy.

Us lazies need tools too!

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#96

Post by [deleted] »

shinycode wrote: post #89
congaliminal wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pro…

[deleted]

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#97

Post by iammrpayments »

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 can’t believe such numbers. If this was true why don’t you quit your job and vibe code 10 ios apps

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#98

Post by KodeNinjaDev »

calrain wrote: post #79
DeepYogurt wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have any open source work you can show off?

Unfortunately not, but ensuring the final code quality will be well written is a challenge I am putting off for now. I'm leaning into the future growth of AI capabilities to help me here, otherwise I'll have to do it myself. That is a tomorrow problem, too much project structure/functionality to get right first.

So you are more productive, as long as you don't have to consider code quality.

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#99

Post by thinkingemote »

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 agree I feel more productive. AI tools do actually make it easier and makes my brain use less energy. You would think that would be more productive but maybe it just feels that way.

Stage magicians say that the magic is done in the audiences memory after the trick is done. It's the effect of the activity.

AI coding tools makes developers happier and able to spend more brain power on actually difficult things. But overall perhaps the amount of work isn't in orders of magnitudes it just feels like it.

Waze the navigation app routes you in non standard routes so that you are not stuck in traffic, so it feels fast that you are making progress. But the time taken may be longer and the distance travelled may be further!

Being in stuck traffic and not moving even for a little bit makes you feel that time has stopped, it's boring and frustrating. Now developers need never be stuck. Their roads will be clear, but they may take longer routes.

We get little boosts of dopamine using AI tools to do stuff. Perhaps we used these signals as indicators of productivity "Ahh that days work felt good, I did a lot"

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#100

Post by calrain »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #90
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…

> 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 thos…

Yes, things that get resolved very quickly with AI include fixing Linting errors, reorganizing CI pipelines, documenting agreed on requirements, building well documented commits, cleaning up temporary files used to validate dev work, building README.md's in key locations to describe important code aspects, implementing difficult but well known code, e.g. I got a trie security model implemented very quickly.

Tons of dev work is not exciting, I have already launched a solo dev startup that was acquired, and the 'fun' part of that coding was minimal. Too much was the scaffolding, CRUD endpoints, web forms, build scripts, endpoint documentation, and the true innovative stuff was such a small part of the whole project. Of the 14 months of work, only 1 month was truly innovative.

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