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Ask HN: By what percentage has AI changed your output as a software engineer?

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Re: Ask HN: By what percentage has AI changed your output as a software engineer?

#31

Post by loldot_ »

I don’t know, it still feels like a productivity lottery to me. The simpler the task, the higher the odds of a big productivity gain, and it can be probably an order of magnitude quicker, especially if the output is very verbose, like frontend tends to be.

But I still haven’t dialed exactly what is too complicated for the LLM to handle (and that goalpost seems to still be moving, but slower now). Because it is almost always very close, I often end up trying to fix the prompt a few times before giving up and just doing it from scratch myself. I think in total the productivity gain for me is probably a lot less than 100%, but more than 0%.

Re: Ask HN: By what percentage has AI changed your output as a software engineer?

#32

Post by gvurrdon »

There has been very little change for me. The one area where AI has been of use is for providing debugging suggestions in those circumstances when I am so short of ideas that I am contemplating posting a question on Stack Overflow. Only once has Chat GPT actually found a bug directly, but on a handful of occasions it has made suggestions which have yielded results when investigated further in traditional way (e.g. reading documentation). Still, At least the AI actually does something rather than ignore me or scold me for the way I have posed my question.

Re: Ask HN: By what percentage has AI changed your output as a software engineer?

#34

Post by grim_io »

I simply have more fun doing my job.

At work, many of my colleagues are too busy to collaborate and brainstorm with me, who enjoys it a lot and have a lot of energy for it.

They are classic 9to5 and that's fine, but I like software development and talking about it.

So instead of only doing it by myself, or tiring out my colleagues, I collaborate with AI.

Re: Ask HN: By what percentage has AI changed your output as a software engineer?

#35

Post by omnimus »

jen729w wrote: post #19

It really helps where the code I'm writing fits the broad description of boilerplate . Need to integrate Stripe with the Clerk API in my Astro project? Claude's all over that. 300% faster. I think of it like, if there was a package that did exactly what I wanted, I'd use that package. There just happens not to be; but Claude excels at package-like code. But as soon as I need to write any unique code – the code that m…

This. LLMs are good at stuff that is very general (is often in the dataset). What i gain most from LLM is when i use it to teach me - like extended documentation.

But to make unique solutions you will get pretty random results and worse you are not building understanding and domain knowledge of your program.

Claude Code sounds cool until it makes 3 changes at once 2 of which you are unsure if they are required or if they wont't break something else. I like it for scripts, data transformations and self contained small programs where i can easily verify correctness.

Re: Ask HN: By what percentage has AI changed your output as a software engineer?

#36

Post by grumbel »

mattmanser wrote: post #12
dipeshsukhani wrote: post #5

For me it feels like roughly a 10–20x change, but mostly because I restructured how I work rather than just adding an “AI helper” on top. In the last year I’ve shipped a couple of small OSS tools that I almost certainly would not have finished without AI‑assisted “vibe coding”. Everything I build now flows through AI, but in a slightly different way than just chatting with an LLM. I rarely use standalone ChatGPT/Gemi…

If you were 20x faster you'd have done an entire career's worth of progress this year. Have you? Are you making tons of money? Have you achieved 20x the amount than you have all previous years? Take a step back and realize what you're claiming here.

When it comes to small focused OSS tools, you can basically code them at the speed of thought with modern LLMs. The slow part is figuring out what you want to do in the first place, the implementing is basically instantaneous. It's literally faster than googling a tool that already does the job.

And yes, that doesn't scale to all problem domains or problem sizes, but in some areas even a 20x speedup would be a huge understatement.

Re: Ask HN: By what percentage has AI changed your output as a software engineer?

#38

Post by lopatin »

It’s immeasurable. I use AI for powering through personal projects, which would not have gotten done without AI because I also have a job and a life. It allows me to focus on the product and requirements rather than the code. It’s hard to measure because the projects would simply not have gotten done without it.

Re: Ask HN: By what percentage has AI changed your output as a software engineer?

#39

Post by rspoerri »

It changed my ability to create something in the evenings where i would normally be to tired to work on a project. Also it changed my work to be a frontend designer/tester instead of programming, i was able to iterate on ideas much faster and create a much more usable product. But getting the code to work flawless is a pain and it makes me clean up and re-test tons of times.

I am working on this: https://github.com/ludos1978/ludos-vscode-markdown-kanban

Re: Ask HN: By what percentage has AI changed your output as a software engineer?

#40

Post by fouronnes3 »

lopatin wrote: post #38

It’s immeasurable. I use AI for powering through personal projects, which would not have gotten done without AI because I also have a job and a life. It allows me to focus on the product and requirements rather than the code. It’s hard to measure because the projects would simply not have gotten done without it.

The most fascinating thing about AI is how in a thread like this one, answers range between 0% and infinity.
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