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AI coding tools can reduce productivity

secondthoughts.ai

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Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#201

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 »

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 you touched on an important aspect, but did not explore it further.

If we accept that AI is a tool, then then problem is the nature of the tool as it will vary heavily from individual to individual. This partially accounts for the ridiculous differences from self reported accounts of people, who use it on a regular basis.

And then, there is a possibility that my questions are not that unusual and/or are well documented ( quite possible ) so my perception of the usefulness of those answers is skewed.

My recent interaction with o4 was pretty decent on a very new ( by industry standards ) development and while documentation for it exists, it is a swirling vortex of insanity from where I sit. I was actually amazed to see how easily 4o saw some of those discrepancies and listed those to me along with likely pitfalls that may come with it. We will be able to find if that prediction holds v.soon.

What I am saying is that it has its uses.

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#202

Post by _heimdall »

I have never found a measure of programmer productivity that makes sense to me, but I can say that LLM coding tools are way more distracting to me than they are worth. They constantly guess at what I may type next, are often wrong, and pop in with suggestions breaking my mental flow and making me switch from the mindset of coding to the mindset of reviewing code.

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#203

Post by [deleted] »

bheadmaster wrote: post #189
AllegedAlec wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Patient outcome and contentedness compared to others with similar indications Which would incentivise doctors to refuse to treat patients who are more ill, lest they risk their ratings go down.

[deleted]

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#204

Post by YurgenJurgensen »

raincole wrote: post #126
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.

Being 20x increase in productivity won't come with a 20x money made. Unless you somehow monopoly the extra productivity. A simple example: if someone patents a machine that makes canned tuna 10 times faster than how they're currently being made, would tuna factories make 10 times more money? The answer is obviously no. Actually, they'd make the same money as before, or even less than that. Only the one who makes such…

The conclusion there, and here, is that canning tuna ten times faster doesn’t increase productivity by ten times (because the there’s other limiting factors). Or: No software project was ever late because the typing took too long.

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#205

Post by skydhash »

calrain wrote: post #106
KodeNinjaDev wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Possibly, but not really. With most projects where innovation is a key requirement, the goal isn't to write textbook quality code, it's to prove your ideas work and quickly evolve the project. Once you have an idea of how it's going to work, you can then choose to start over from scratch or continue on and clean up all the bits you skipped over. Right now I'm in the innovation cycle, and having AI able to pick up who…

> Code quality and pen tests are critical, but they can come later.

In my experience, no.

These kind of shortcuts taken at the beginning of the project is why velocity have a sharp descent after some times. Because you’re either spending time undoing all of it (unlikely to be allowed) or you’re fighting in the code jungle trying to get some feature out.

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#206

Post by calrain »

lucianbr wrote: post #140
calrain wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had a lot of issues with Claude and web development. I ended up asking it how it wanted to work and would an 'AdminKit Template' work to get things moving. It recommended AdminKit and that was a good move. For me, custom UI's aren't a big part of the solution, I just need web pages to manage CRUD endpoints to manage the product. AdminKit has been a good fit so far, but it was a fresh start, no migration.

You asked Claude if AdminKit would work and in answer it recommended AdminKit? Seriously? Wow, what an unexpected turn of events. I am flabbergasted.

Apologies, it was a typo. I asked what 'Admin Template' because there are so many, and rather than build something from scratch, I wanted one it seemed to have understanding of.

It mentioned AdminKit and it worked out pretty well.

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#207

Post by matkoniecz »

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.

> Patient outcome and contentedness compared to others with similar indications.

and how you would achieve it? "similar indications" would be coming from doctor that you are trying to rate

rating "contentedness" gets you doctors prescribing useless medications to keep patients happy

expert surgeons have often bad survival rates as they get complicated cases, and trying to rate how complicated cases are to compare two experts would be nightmare as bad as rating doctors - so you only replace one hard problem with another as hard problem

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#208

Post by hammyhavoc »

jack_pp wrote: post #76
hammyhavoc wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You can say the same about a printer. Or a kindle, oh you're too lazy to carry around 5 books with you?

Uh, no you can't.

> 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".

A Kindle is exactly the kind of device you would research and educate yourself via and the quantity of books has nothing to do with the reading of them or contents thereof. Terrible comparison.

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#209

Post by discordance »

halamadrid wrote: post #124
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.

For the sake of argument 20x means you have basically suddenly got access to 19 people with the same skill set as you. You can build a new product company with 20 people. Probably in the same domain as you are in right now.

Output doesn't necessarily scale linearly with as you add more people. Look up mythical man.

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#210

Post by diggan »

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…

> You ask very specific questions where not a lot of documentation is available and inevetably even o3 ends up being pretty useless.

You have any example questions where o3 failed to be helpful?

I use it pretty similarly to you, only resorting to it to unblock myself basically, otherwise I'm mostly the one doing the actual work, LLMs help with specific functions or specific blockers, or exploring new "spaces". But almost all the times I've gotten stuck, o3 (and o3-pro mode) managed to unstuck me, once I've figured out the right way to ask the question, even when my own searching and reading didn't help.

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