AI coding tools can reduce productivity • Hacker News Board

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#191

Post by jaredklewis » Fri, Jul 11, 2025, 10:33 AM UTC

numpad0 wrote: post #184

jaredklewis wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

life expectancy, standardized qol metrics. or patients seen, revenue per patients, hours worked etc can be metrics if those _were_ what you wanted. the point is, the answer is yes, they have measures of better/worse docs in their field.

Yea, those are all pretty shit metrics.

We have that shit like that too in SWE. Lines of code, github issues closed, features shipped, etc…

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#192

Post by philbo » Fri, Jul 11, 2025, 10:34 AM UTC

alternatex wrote: post #186

philbo wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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; reduci…

I'll try a counterargument. If more code is more technical debt then writing more succinct code is less technical debt. But succinct code is often harder to grok and maintain than code written for the average Joe dev. So less code can sometimes mean less maintainability and thus more technical debt. I think you instead meant to say more business logic implemented in code is more technical debt, not necessarily just m…

No, I really mean more code. It's an unpopular opinion I know, but I think debt scales linearly with code, mainly because I also think bugs scale linearly with code. I recognise that readability and maintainability are important, but it doesn't change the basic equivalence of code = debt for me.

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#193

Post by skydhash » Fri, Jul 11, 2025, 10:35 AM UTC

rcxdude wrote: post #182

latexr wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, yes we can. Could you make an effort to explain how, or at the very least link to some reasoning? Otherwise your comment is basically the equivalent of “nuh-uh”, which doesn’t meaningfully contribute to the discussion. > Programmers really need to stop this cope about us being such special snowflakes Which is not at all what is happening in your parent comment. On the contrary, they’re putting developers on ev…

>Could you make an effort to explain how, or at the very least link to some reasoning? Otherwise your comment is basically the equivalent of “nuh-uh”, which doesn’t meaningfully contribute to the discussion. You can look at the kind of work they're doing, how effective their solutions are, and how long it takes them to do it. That's the basics of it across a wide range of professions. Now, there's no one-size-fits-al…

> You can look at the kind of work they're doing, how effective their solutions are, and how long it takes them to do it. That's the basics of it across a wide range of professions. Now, there's no one-size-fits-all metric or formula you can just calculate based on objective facts for most of this, because the work is more varied than e.g. factory work, but it's also not impossible to make the comparison, if you actually understand the work reasonably and you use judgement.

AKA, be subjective! Which people are wary of, because what it brings is politics and tribalism.

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#194

Post by Tainnor » Fri, Jul 11, 2025, 10:39 AM UTC

freetime2 wrote: post #17

Tainnor wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sample size isn't 16 developers, it's 246 issues.

So agree with that - but on the other hand surely the number of developers matters here? For example, if instead of 16 developers the study consisted of a single developer completing all 246 tasks with or without AI, and comparing the observed times to complete, I think most people would question the reproducibility and relevancy of the study?

It matters in the sense that it is unclear whether the findings generalise to other people. Which is a problem that a lot of studies, even with more participants, have because they may not have a diverse enough set of participants.

But in terms of pure statistical validity, I don't think it matters.

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#195

Post by tomcam » Fri, Jul 11, 2025, 10:41 AM UTC

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.

So what methods do you use?

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#196

Post by skydhash » Fri, Jul 11, 2025, 10:49 AM UTC

jack_pp wrote: post #84

baq wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 jus…

Most components are routine work, that you kinda snooze through. I like them as a kind of mental break: write tests, write code, run tests/linter.

The difficult part is reading thousand lines of unfamiliar code to measure the impact of a fix, finding the fix by reasoning about the whole moduke, designing a feature for long term maintainability,…

Note that all of them requires thinking and not much coding. Coding is easy, especially when you’ve done all the (correct?) thinking beforehand.

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#197

Post by jaredklewis » Fri, Jul 11, 2025, 10:58 AM UTC

AllegedAlec wrote: post #165

jaredklewis wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> At the end of the road. Patient outcome and contentedness compared to others with similar indications.

Well I would first of all remark that this doesn’t seem and to be how it’s normally done as I’ve never been asked to rate my “contentedness” or similar with my medical care.

And where is the “end of the road?” Most medical interventions could be plausibly evaluated at all manner of different intervals.

Also, “similar indications” is doing a lot of work here. Patient outcomes are often influenced more by the individual than the doctor. By the time you bucket all the patients by age, diet, activity level, smoking status, alcohol intake, metabolic health, bmi, family history, etc…buckets are going to be pretty tiny. Clinics and hospitals aren’t that big, there won’t be anything to compare. If you only bucket the most obvious categories like age, you’ll have comparisons, but it will just be noise.

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#198

Post by rightbyte » Fri, Jul 11, 2025, 10:59 AM UTC

danielbln wrote: post #163

rightbyte wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Sure but that would be 40 months with claimed LLM augmentation though. I don't feel it.

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#199

Post by metaltyphoon » Fri, Jul 11, 2025, 11:09 AM UTC

danielbln wrote: post #163

rightbyte wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

4 months but now 10-20x more productive means there should be an explosions of projects! So where is it?

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#200

Post by Tainnor » Fri, Jul 11, 2025, 11:14 AM UTC

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #169

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. -…

> 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.

I find the worst part to be when it doesn't correct flaws in my assumptions.

For example, yesterday I asked it "what is the difference between these two Datadog queries"? And it replied something that was semi-correct, but it didn't discover the fundamental flaw - that the first one wasn't a valid query because of unbalanced parens. In fact, it turns out that the two strings (+ another one) would get concatenated and only then would it be a valid query.

A simple "the first string is not a valid query because of a missing closing paren" would have saved a lot of time in trying to understand this, and I suspect that's what I would have received if I had prompted it with "what's the problem with this query" but LLMs are just too sycophantic to help with these things.