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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

#61

Post by lvl155 »

antimora wrote: post #50

I'm one of the regular code reviewers for Burn (a deep learning framework in Rust). I recently had to close a PR because the submitter's bug fix was clearly written entirely by an AI agent. The "fix" simply muted an error instead of addressing the root cause. This is exactly what AI tends to do when it can't identify the actual problem. The code was unnecessarily verbose and even included tests for muting the error.…

This is a real problem that’s only going to get worse. With the major model providers basically keeping all the data themselves, I frankly don’t like this trend long term.

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

#62

Post by tomrod »

antimora wrote: post #50

I'm one of the regular code reviewers for Burn (a deep learning framework in Rust). I recently had to close a PR because the submitter's bug fix was clearly written entirely by an AI agent. The "fix" simply muted an error instead of addressing the root cause. This is exactly what AI tends to do when it can't identify the actual problem. The code was unnecessarily verbose and even included tests for muting the error.…

As a side question: I work in AI, but mostly python and theory work. How can I best jump into Burn? Rust has been intriguing to me for a long time

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

#63

Post by antonvs »

narush wrote: post #27

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 so…

> Early-2025 AI slows down experienced open-source developers.

Even that's too general, because it'll depend on what the task is. It's not as if open source developers in general never work on tasks where AI could save time.

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

#64

Post by bluefirebrand »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #4

What I thought was fascinating, and should be a warning sign to everyone here: Before beginning the study, the average developer expected about a 20% productivity boost. After ending the study, the average developer (potentially: you) believed they actually were 20% more productive. In reality, they were 0% more productive at best, and 40% less productive at worst. Think about what it would be like to be that develop…

> Also consider, quite terrifyingly, if said developers were in an online group, together, like... here. The one developer who said she thought it made everyone slower (the truth in this particular case), would be unanimously considered an idiot, downvoted to the full -4, even with the benefit of hindsight

Yeah, this is me at my job right now. Every time I express even the mildest skepticism about the value of our Cursor subscription, I'm getting follow up conversations basically telling me to shut up about it

It's been very demoralizing. You're not allowed to question the Emperor's new clothes

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

#65

Post by raincole »

antonvs wrote: post #54
kevmo314 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've missed the point of the article, which in fact agrees with your anecdote. > It's equally common for developers to work in environments where little value is placed on understanding systems, but a lot of value is placed on quickly delivering changes that mostly work. In this context, I think that AI tools have more of an advantage. They can ingest the unfamiliar codebase faster than any human can, and can often…

> You've missed the point of the article Sadly clickbait headlines like the OP, "AI slows down open source developers," spread this misinformation, ensuring that a majority of people will have the same misapprehension.

Which is a good thing for people who are currently benefiting from AI, though. The slower other programmers adopt AI, the more edge those who are proficient with it have.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize a simple fact: using AI well is a shallow skill that everyone can learn in days or even hours if they want. And then my small advantage of knowing AI tools will disappear. Since the realization I've been always upvoting articles that claims AI makes you less productive (like the OP).

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

#67

Post by Navarr »

Vegenoid wrote: post #45
nico wrote: post #8

> They are experienced open source developers, working on their own projects I just started working on a 3-month old codebase written by someone else, in a framework and architecture I had never used before Within a couple hours, with the help of Claude Code, I had already created a really nice system to replicate data from staging to local development. Something I had built before in other projects, and I new that m…

I have had similar experiences as you, but this is not the kind of work that the study is talking about: “When open source developers working in codebases that they are deeply familiar with use AI tools to complete a task, they take longer to complete that task” I have anecdotally found this to be true as well, that an LLM greatly accelerates my ramp up time in a new codebase, but then actually leads me astray once I…

> I have anecdotally found this to be true as well, that an LLM greatly accelerates my ramp up time in a new codebase, but then actually leads me astray once I am familiar with the project.

If you are unfamiliar with the project, how do you determine that it wasn't leading you astray in the first place? Do you ever revisit what you had done with AI previously to make sure that, once you know your way around, it was doing it the right way?

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

#68

Post by bluefirebrand »

ethan_smith wrote: post #20
mkagenius wrote: post #2

AI tends to slow us down because we don't really know what it's good at. Can it write a proper Nginx config? I don't know—let's try. And then we end up wasting 30 minutes on it. Fully autonomous coding tools like v0, a0, or Aider work well as long as the context is small. But once the context grows—usually due to mistakes made in earlier steps—they just can’t keep up. There's no real benefit of "try again" loop yet.…

The context switching cost between coding and AI interaction is substantial and rarely measured in these studies. Each prompt/review cycle breaks flow state, which is particularly damaging for complex programming tasks where deep concentration yields the greatest productivity.

This has been my experience too

Ever since my company made switching to Cursor mandatory, I have not been able to hit any kind of flow. I know my own productivity has plummeted and I suspect many others are as well, but no one is saying anything

I have spoken up once or twice and only been smacked down for my troubles, so I am not surprised everyone else is clammed up

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

#69

Post by dawnerd »

antimora wrote: post #50

I'm one of the regular code reviewers for Burn (a deep learning framework in Rust). I recently had to close a PR because the submitter's bug fix was clearly written entirely by an AI agent. The "fix" simply muted an error instead of addressing the root cause. This is exactly what AI tends to do when it can't identify the actual problem. The code was unnecessarily verbose and even included tests for muting the error.…

That's what I love about LLMs. You can spot it doesn't know the answer, tell it that it's wrong and it'll go, "You're absolutely right. Let me actually fix it"

It scares me how much code is being produced by people without enough experience to spot issues or people that just gave up caring. We're going to be in for wild ride when all the exploits start flowing.

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

#70

Post by sumeno »

rosspackard wrote: post #49
sumeno wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And they weren't allowed to pick which tasks they used the AI on. They were allowed to pick whether or not to use AI on a subset of tasks. They weren't forced to use AI on tasks that don't make sense for AI

Half the tasks they were not allowed to use AI.

Yes, and the other half they had the option to use AI. That's why I said they were allowed to pick whether or not to use AI on a subset of tasks. On the other subset they were not allowed to use AI.
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