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AI coding tools can reduce productivity

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Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#171

Post by rsanheim »

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 don't think that dichotomy is true at all, at least not with experienced software people.

Many folks I know are skeptical of the hype, or maybe full on anti/distrustful, due to reasons I think are valid. But many of those same people have tried llm tools, maybe chatgpt or copilot or cursor, and recognize the value even w/ huge misgivings. Some of have gone further with tools like claude code and seen the real potential there, quite a step beyond fancy auto-complete or just-in-time agents...but even there you can end up in rabbit-holes and drowning in horrible design.

In your incredibly reductive scale, I'm closer to 'love' than 'skeptical', but I'm often much of both sides. But I'd never write a prompt like 'write me some typescript' for any real work, or honestly anything close to that, unless its just for memes or demonstrations.

But no-one who programs for a living uses prompts like that, at least not for real work. That is just silly talk.

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#172

Post by aleph_minus_one »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #166
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 m…

> 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.

The usual counter-point is that if you (commonly) write code by experimenting, you are doing it wrong. Better think the problem through, and then write decent code (that you finally turn into great code). If the code that you start with is that as "naive" as you describe, in my experience it is nearly always better to throw it away (you can't make gold out of shit) and completely start over, i.e. think the problem through and then write decent code.

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#173

Post by rsanheim »

cluckindan wrote: post #87
calrain wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

yes, definitely. https://github.com/BeehiveInnovations/zen-mcp-server is one example of people going off on this, but i'm sure there are many others

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#174

Post by latexr »

thangalin wrote: post #135
DeepYogurt wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have any open source work you can show off?

Not the OP, but: https://repo.autonoma.ca/notanexus.git I don't know the PDF.js library. Writing both the client- and server-side for a PDF annotation editor would have taken 60 hours, maybe more. Instead, a combination Copilot, DeepSeek, Claude, and Gemini yielded a working prototype in under 6 hours: https://repo.autonoma.ca/notanexus.git/tree/HEAD/src/js I wrote maybe 3 lines of JavaScript, the rest was all prompt…

> Writing both the client- and server-side for a PDF annotation editor would have taken 60 hours, maybe more.

How do you know? Seems to me you’re making the exact same estimation mistake of the people in the study.

> Instead, a combination Copilot, DeepSeek, Claude, and Gemini yielded a working prototype in under 6 hours

Six hours for a prototype using four LLMs? That is not impressive, it sounds insane and a tremendous mess that will take so long to dig out of the prototype stage it’ll effectively require a rewrite.

And why are you comparing an LLM prototype to a finished product “by hand” (I surely hope you’re not suggesting such a prototype would take sixty hours)? That is disingenuous and skewing the numbers.

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#175

Post by philbo »

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…

I have an extremist take on this:

All source code is technical debt. If you increase the amount of code, you increase the amount of debt. It's impossible to reduce debt with more code. The only way to reduce debt is by reducing code.

(and note that I'm not measuring code in bytes here; switching to single-character variable names would not reduce debt. I'm measuring it in statements, expressions, instructions; reducing those without reducing functionality decreases debt)

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#176

Post by calrain »

lucianbr wrote: post #139
calrain wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is satire, right? You're 60ish years old, and hyper optimistic about AI, it's making you tens of times more productive, paste code from one AI to another, one is the dev and the other is the architect... I mean, it's literally unbelievable.

It is

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#177

Post by calrain »

latexr wrote: post #161
calrain wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How do you measure 20x when someone says they do that?

Does that mean you deliver the same amount of code in the same time with 20x less bugs?

Or the same quality code in 20x less time?

Or 10x less bugs in 2x less time?

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#178

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #172
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

> 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. The usual counter-point is that if you (commonly) write code by experimenting, you are doing it wrong. Better think the problem through, and the…

That’s often what I do. It saves me the “blind alleys.”

I find they often cause more trouble than they are worth, because they are completely wrong, and need to be “unlearned.”

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#179

Post by latexr »

calrain wrote: post #177
latexr wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

How do you measure 20x when someone says they do that? Does that mean you deliver the same amount of code in the same time with 20x less bugs? Or the same quality code in 20x less time? Or 10x less bugs in 2x less time?

An honest measurement tries to consider the aggregate, not one single point.

If you had a hammer which could drive a nail through a plank 20x faster but took 60x longer to prepare before each strike, claiming 20x gains would be disingenuous.

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#180

Post by ttoinou »

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.

Actually, we can’t quantify most of the things we would like to optimize.
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