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AI coding tools can reduce productivity

secondthoughts.ai

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Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#161

Post by latexr »

calrain wrote: post #125
gbalduzzi wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you are understanding how big 10x and 20x are. It means you can replace a whole team of developers alone. I can believe that some tasks are speed up by 10x or even 20x, but I find very hard to believe it's the average of your productivity (maintaining good code quality)

I mean from a time perspective, your mileage may vary. So me finishing a carded up block of work that is expected to take 2 weeks (80 hours) and I get it done in 1 day (8 hours) then that would be a 10x boost. There are always tar pits of time where you are no better off with AI, but sometimes it's 20x. I've setup development teams in the past, and have have been coding since the late 70's, so I am sort of aware of m…

> There are always tar pits of time where you are no better off with AI, but sometimes it's 20x.

This is absurd measuring. You can’t in good faith claim a 20x improvement if it only happens “sometimes” and other times it’s a time sink.

The more detail you keep providing in this thread, the clearer it becomes your assessment lands somewhere between the disingenuous and the delusional.

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#162

Post by jonathanstrange »

JimDabell wrote: post #160
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.

We can determine productivity for the purpose of studies like this. Give a bunch of developers the exact same task and measure how quickly they can produce a defect-free solution. Unfortunately, this study didn’t do that – the developers chose their own tasks.

Is there any AI that can create a defect-free solution to non-trivial programming problems without supervision? This has never worked in any of my tests, so I suspect the answer is currently No.

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#163

Post by danielbln »

rightbyte wrote: post #129
gtsop wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> in two months what you would do in 4 years There should be a FOSS project explosion if those numbers were true by now. Commercial products too.

Claude Code was released 4 months ago, agebtic coding in general really came into being earlier this year. Maybe give it a minute?

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#164

Post by AllegedAlec »

bheadmaster wrote: post #147
AllegedAlec wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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"

> the metric itself doesn't become a subject to optimization

By making the metrics part of a sustaintable company-wide goal. If there's a company-wide goal to increase X kind of revenue by Y% making actionable targets on how a team can contribute (not lazy shit like "our changes should contribute Z% of that Y%"), and within that create for a person another smaller metric based on that.

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#165

Post by AllegedAlec »

jaredklewis wrote: post #156
AllegedAlec wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

News to me. How do you determine the productivity of a doctor? Patients seen? Patients cured? (for real, where did you get that data?) Number of medicines prescribed? Procedures performed? Does a triple bypass surgery count the same a pap smear? Hours worked? Amount of help they provided to colleagues? Easy to come up with another 100 other metrics that might be worth looking out. How are they all weighted? Like I ge…

> How do you determine the productivity of a doctor?

At the end of the road. Patient outcome and contentedness compared to others with similar indications. Patients seen and all that is that sort of short-term BS that you see everywhere that's giving metrics a bad name. It'd be like determining a mechanic's productivity by how many times he twisted a wrench.

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#166

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

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.

Part of that, may be what we measure “product” to be.

My entire life, I have written “ship” software. It’s been pretty easy to say what my “product” is.

But I have also worked at a fairly small scale, in very small teams (often, only me). I was paid to manage a team, but it was a fairly small team, with highly measurable output. Personally, I have been writing software as free, open-source stuff, and it was easy to measure.

Some time ago, someone posted a story about how most software engineers have hardly ever actually shipped anything. I can’t even imagine that. I would find that incredibly depressing.

It would also make productivity pretty hard to measure. If I spent six months, working on something that never made it out of the cręche, would that mean all my work was for nothing?

Also, really experienced engineers write a lot less code (that does a lot more). They may spend four hours, writing a highly efficient 20-line method, while a less-experienced engineer might write a passable 100-line method in a couple of hours. The experienced engineers’ work might be “one and done,” never needing revision, while the less-experienced engineer’s work is a slow bug farm (loaded with million-dollar security vulnerability tech debt), which means that the productivity is actually deferred, for the more experienced engineer. Their manager may like the less-experienced engineer's work, because they make a lot more noise, doing it, are "faster," and give MOAR LINES. The "down-the-road" tech debt is of no concern to the manager.

I worked for a company that held the engineer Accountable, even if the issue appears, two years after shipping. It encouraged engineers to do their homework, and each team had a dedicated testing section, to ensure that they didn't ship bugs.

When I ask ChatGPT (for example) for a code solution, I find that it’s usually quite “naive” (pretty prolix). I usually end up rewriting it. That doesn’t mean that’s a bad thing, though. It gives me a useful “starting point,” and can save me several hours of experimenting.

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#167

Post by 63stack »

calrain wrote: post #114
iammrpayments wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I wish I could. Some problems are difficult to solve and I still need to pay the bills. So I work 8 hours a day (to get money to eat) and code another 4 hours at home at night. Weekends are both 10 hour days, and then rinse / repeat. Unfortunately some projects are just hard to do and until now, they were too hard to attempt to solve solo. But with AI assistance, I am literally moving mountains. The project may still…

Can't you use your AI skills to work only 1 hour? Or is the 8 hours you work already 10xed by AI?

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#168

Post by StrangeDoctor »

AllegedAlec wrote: post #164
bheadmaster wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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"

> the metric itself doesn't become a subject to optimization By making the metrics part of a sustaintable company-wide goal. If there's a company-wide goal to increase X kind of revenue by Y% making actionable targets on how a team can contribute (not lazy shit like "our changes should contribute Z% of that Y%"), and within that create for a person another smaller metric based on that.

This would be difficult to apply to R&D orgs or anything seen as a typical cost center.

Also, medical facilities… you certainly could define it as profit, but that bothers me and many other people.

You could define it as patients seen, or “cured” but that incentivizes very quick but probably poor care.

You could define it as intensity of treatment or amount of care given, but you’d probably end up in a situation where 1 incredibly sick person has every doctor treating them.

You could define it as…

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#169

Post by aleph_minus_one »

Fraterkes wrote: post #153

I think the dichotomy you see with how positive people are about ai has almost entirely to do with the kind of questions they ask. That seems obvious, but a consequence of that is that people who are sceptical of ai (like me) only use it when they've exhausted other resources (like google). You ask very specific questions where not a lot of documentation is available and inevetably even o3 ends up being pretty useles…

I think there are also other aspects:

- Some people simply ask a lot more questions than others (this ignores whether they like or dislike AI), i.e. some people simply prefer to find things out more by themselves, and thus also use other resources like Google or Stack Overflow as a last resort. So their questions to an AI will likely be more complicated, because they already found out the easy parts by themselves.

- If I have to make the effort to explain to the AI in a sufficiently exhaustive way what I need (which I often have to do), I expect the answers of the AI to be really good. If it isn't, having explained my problem to the AI was simply a waste of time.

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#170

Post by latexr »

calrain wrote: post #121
YurgenJurgensen wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did this 20x increase in productivity come with a 20x increase in salary? Do you clock off at Monday lunchtime and spend the rest of the week playing video games? Did your boss fire nineteen developers and give their jobs to you? If one of these things isn’t true, you’re either a fool or those productivity increases aren’t real.

I probably am a fool :) 10x to 20x is in relation to time, so something that would have taken 2 weeks (80 hours) would be done in 8 hours to be 10x.

Which means you should be perfectly capable of answering two of the three scenarios the other user posed:

> Do you clock off at Monday lunchtime and spend the rest of the week playing video games? Did your boss fire nineteen developers and give their jobs to you?

In other words, how are you taking advantage of all that extra time you claim to have?

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