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AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why

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Re: AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why

#21

Post by RamblingCTO »

rosspackard wrote: post #10

One mediocre paper/study (it should not even be called that with all the bias and sample size issues) and now we have to put up with stories re-hashing and dissecting it. I really hope these don't get upvoted more in the future. 16 devs. And they weren't allowed to pick which tasks they used the AI on. Ridiculous. Also using it on "old and >1 million line" codebases and then extrapolating that to software engineering…

It's just the same with all the anecdotal evidence of some hype guys on twitter claiming 10x performance on coding ... Same same but different

Re: AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why

#22

Post by yomismoaqui »

Someone on X said that these agentic AI tools (Claude Code, Amp, Gemini Cli) are to programming like the table saw was to hand-made woodworking.

It can make some things faster and better than a human with a saw, but you have to learn how to use them right (or you will loose some fingers).

I personally find that agentic AI tools make me be more ambitious in my projects, I can tackle some things I didn't tthougth about doing before. And I also delegate work that I don't like to them because they are going to do it better and quicker than me. So my mind is free to think on the real problems like architecture, the technical debt balance of my code...

Problem is that there is the temptation of letting the AI agent do everything and just commit the result without understanding YOUR code (yes, it was generated by an AI but if you sign the commit YOU are responsible for that code).

So as with any tool try to take the time to understand how to better use it and see if it works for you.

Re: AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why

#25

Post by lupire »

sureglymop wrote: post #9
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps; but this is a developer's own output with an AI tool, compared against their own historical output when they didn't use it. Apparently, the average developer (read: quite possibly most people here) can't even hit the broadside of a barn in estimating their own productivity.

That doesn't surprise me at all. Isn't software engineering in essence about being constantly confronted with new problems to solve and having to come up with a sufficient one on the fly? It seems very hard to estimate this, even if you know yourself well.

They were 20% underestimating how long it took them to do a 1-8 hr task that they had just completed.

It's like Tog's study that people think Keyboard is faster than the mouse even when they are faster with the mouse. Because they are measuring how they feel, not what is actually happening.

https://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html

Re: AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why

#26

Post by bgwalter »

yomismoaqui wrote: post #22

Someone on X said that these agentic AI tools (Claude Code, Amp, Gemini Cli) are to programming like the table saw was to hand-made woodworking. It can make some things faster and better than a human with a saw, but you have to learn how to use them right (or you will loose some fingers). I personally find that agentic AI tools make me be more ambitious in my projects, I can tackle some things I didn't tthougth about…

"You are using it wrong!"

This is insulting to all pre-2023 open source developers, who produced the entire stack that the "AI" robber barons use in their companies.

It is even more insulting because no actual software of value has been demonstrably produced using "AI".

Re: AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why

#27

Post by narush »

Hey HN -- study author here! (See previous thread on the paper here [1].)

I think this blog post is an interesting take on one specific factor that is likely contributing to slowdown. We discuss this in the paper [2] in the section "Implicit repository context (C.1.5)" -- check it out if you want to see some developer quotes about this factor.

> This is why AI coding tools, as they exist today, will generally slow someone down if they know what they are doing, and are working on a project that they understand.

I made this point in the other thread discussing the study, but in general, these results being surprising makes it easy to read the paper, find one factor that resonates, and conclude "ah, this one factor probably just explains slowdown." My guess: there is no one factor -- there's a bunch of factors that contribute to this result -- at least 5 seem likely, and at least 9 we can't rule out (see the full factors table on page 11).

> If there are no takers then I might try experimenting on myself.

This sounds super cool! I'd be very excited to see how you set this up + how it turns out... please do shoot me an email (in the paper) if you do this!

> AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why

Nit: I appreciate how hard it is to write short titles summarizing the paper (the graph title is the best I was able to do after a lot of trying) -- but I might have written this "Early-2025 AI slows down experienced open-source developers. Peter Naur can give us more context about one specific factor." It's admittedly less of a catchy-title, but I think getting the qualifications right are really important!

Thanks again for the sweet write-up! I'll hang around in the comments today as well.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44522772

[2] https://metr.org/Early_2025_AI_Experienced_OS_Devs_Study.pdf

Re: AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why

#28

Post by neuroelectron »

Good article and it makes sense. I wish I had sometime in my career worked on a codebase that was possible to be understood without 10 years of experience. Instead most of my development time was spent tracing execution paths through tangles of abstractions in nested objects in 10M LOC legacy codebases. My buddy who introduced me to the job is still doing it today and now uses AI and this has given him the free time to start working on his own side projects. So there's certain types if jobs where AI will certainly speed up your development.

Re: AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why

#29

Post by bunderbunder »

> It's a really fabulous study...

Ehhhh... not so much. It had serious design flaws in both the protocol and the analysis. This blog post is a fairly approachable explanation of what's wrong with it: https://www.argmin.net/p/are-developers-finally-out-of-a-job

Re: AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why

#30

Post by jplusequalt »

rosspackard wrote: post #10

One mediocre paper/study (it should not even be called that with all the bias and sample size issues) and now we have to put up with stories re-hashing and dissecting it. I really hope these don't get upvoted more in the future. 16 devs. And they weren't allowed to pick which tasks they used the AI on. Ridiculous. Also using it on "old and >1 million line" codebases and then extrapolating that to software engineering…

>One mediocre paper/study (it should not even be called that with all the bias and sample size issues)

Can you bring up any specific issues with the metr study? Alternatively, can you site a journal that critiques it?

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