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AI coding tools can reduce productivity

secondthoughts.ai

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Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#141

Post by Ma8ee »

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…

We can determine the productivity of factory workers, and that is still(!) how we are seen by some managers.

And to be fair, some crud work is repetitive enough so it should be possible to get a fair measure of at least the difference in speed between developers.

But that building simple crud services with rest interfaces takes as much time as it does is a failure of the tools we use.

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#142

Post by AllegedAlec »

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…

> Like can we determine the productivity of doctors, lawyers, journalists, or pastry chefs?

Yes, yes we can.

Programmers really need to stop this cope about us being such special snowflakes that we can't be assessed and that our maangers just need to take that we're worth keeping around on good faith.

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#143

Post by timeon »

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…

> it cost me 275$ for nothing

Recently, there was story about developer who was able to crush interview and got parallel full-time jobs in several start-ups. Initially he was able to deliver but then not so much.

Somehow your case is reminding this to me, where AI is this overemployed developer.

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#144

Post by sensanaty »

latenightcoding wrote: post #2

LLMs make me 10-20x more productive in frontend work which I barely do. But when it comes to low-level stuff (C/C++) I personally don't find it too useful. it just replaces my need to search stackoverflow. edit: should have mentioned the low-level stuff I work on is mature code and a lot of times novel.

As the fullstacker with a roughly 65/35 split BE/FE on the team who has to review this kinda stuff on the daily, there's nothing I dread more than a backender writing FE tickets and vice versa.

Just last week I had to review some monstrosity of a FE ticket written by one of our backenders, with the comment of "it's 90% there, should be good to takeover". I had to throw out pretty much everything and rewrite it from scratch. My solution was like 150 lines modified, whereas the monstrous output of the AI was non-functional, ugly, a performance nightmare and around 800 lines, with extremely unhelpful and generic commit messages to the tune of "Made things great!!1!1!!".

I can't even really blame them, the C-level craze and zeal for the AI shit is such that if you're not doing crap like this you get scrutinized and PIP'd.

At least frontenders usually have some humility and will tell you they have no clue if it's a good solution or not, while BEnders are always for some reason extremely dismissive of FE work (as can be seen in this very thread). It's truly baffling to me

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#145

Post by newswasboring »

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?

How much of the code you write is actually like this? I work in the domain of data modeling, for me once the math is worked out majority of the code is "trivial". The kind of code you are talking about is maybe 20% of my time. Honestly, also the most enjoyable 20%. I will be very happy if that is all I would work on while rest of it done by AI.

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#146

Post by blub »

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.

Team members always know who is productive and who isn’t, but generally don’t snitch to the management because it will be used against them or cause conflicts with colleagues. This team-level productivity doesn’t necessarily translate into something positive for a company.

Management is forced to rely on various metrics which are gamed or inaccurate.

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#147

Post by bheadmaster »

AllegedAlec wrote: post #142
jaredklewis wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Like can we determine the productivity of doctors, lawyers, journalists, or pastry chefs? Yes, yes we can. Programmers really need to stop this cope about us being such special snowflakes that we can't be assessed and that our maangers just need to take that we're worth keeping around on good faith.

> Yes, yes we can.

Of course we can. But can we do it in a meaningful way, such that the metric itself doesn't become a subject to optimization?

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#148

Post by vouaobrasil »

AI could make me more productive, I know that for a fact. But, I don't want to be more productive because the tasks that could be automated with AI are those I find enjoyable. Not always in an intellectual sense, but in a meditative sense. And if I automated those away, I think I would become less human.

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#149

Post by bonsai_bar »

camgunz wrote: post #132

I finally took the plunge and did a big chunk of work in Cursor. It was pretty ideal: greenfield but with a very relevant example to slightly modify (the example pulled events over HTTP as a server and I wanted it to pull events over Google pub/sub instead). Over IDK, 2-3 hours I got something that seemed on its face to work, but: - it didn't use the pub/sub API correctly - the 1 low-coverage test it generated didn't…

You're using it wrong -- it's intended to be a conversational experience. There are so many techniques you can utilize to improve the output while retaining the mental model of codebase.

Respectfully, this is user error.

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#150

Post by handfuloflight »

dismalaf wrote: post #54

I find LLMs are decent at regurgitating boilerplate. Basically the same kind of stuff you could google then copy-paste... AI chatbots, now that they have web access, are also good at going over documentation and save you a little time searching through the docs yourself. They're not great at business logic though, especially if you're doing anything remotely novel. Which is the difficult part of programming anyway. B…

This isn't true, and I know it by what I'm working on and sorry, I'm not at liberty to give more details. But I see how untrue this is, every working hour of every day.
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