Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s lots of slop out there, that doesn’t mean it’s actually good or useful code.
Keep moving those goal posts.
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AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox
71–80 of 783 posts
Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
The comparison seems flawed in terms of cost. A Claude subscription is 20 bucks per worker if using personal accounts billed to the company, which is not very far from common office tools like slack. Onboarding a worker to Claude or ChatGPT is ridiculously easy compared to teaching a 1970’s manual office worker to use an early computer. Larger implementations like automating customer service might be more costly, but…
What if LLMs are optimizing the average office worker's productivity but the work itself simply has no discernable economic value? This is argued at length in Grebber's Bullshit Jobs essay and book.
And that book sort of vaguely hints around at all these jobs that are surely bullshit but won’t identify them concretely.
Not recognizing the essential role of sales seemed to be a common mistake.
Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is saving 500$ by generating some shitty AI art the bar? I thought this supposed to replace entire departments
Someone asked “where are all the small businesses”, this was a reply to that. Small businesses don’t have entire art departments.
Gotcha, so the impact of AI is small businesses get to save a couple hundred dollars and the cost is only 2% of your countries GDP. That’s good.
Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s lots of slop out there, that doesn’t mean it’s actually good or useful code.
Keep moving those goal posts.
They didn’t, amazing open source was asked for, meaningless stats were given. Not that GitHub public repositories were amazing before AI, but nothing has changed since, except AI slop being a new category.
Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
100% All of the people who are floored by AI capabilities right now are software engineers, and everyone who's extremely skeptical basically has any other office job. On investigating their primary AI interaction surface, it's Microsoft Co-Pilot, which has to be the absolute shittiest implementation of any AI system so far. As a progress-driven person, it's just super disappointing to see how few people are benefitin…
I'm a SWE who's been using coding agents daily for the last 6 months and I'm still skeptical. For my team at least, the productivity boost is difficult to quantify objectively. Our products and services have still tons of issues that AI isn't going to solve magically. It's pretty clear that AI is allowing to move faster for some tasks, but it's also detrimental for other things. We're going to learn how to use these…
> I'm a SWE who's been using coding agents daily for the last 6 months and I'm still skeptical.
What improvements have you noticed over that time?
It seems like the models coming out in the last several weeks are dramatically superior to those mid-last year. Does that match your experience?
Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox
#76It’s simple calculus for business leaders: admit they’re laying off workers because the fundamentals are bad and spook investors, admit they’re laying off workers because the economy is bad and anger the administration, or just say it’s AI making roles unnecessary and hope for the best.
Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s lots of slop out there, that doesn’t mean it’s actually good or useful code.
Keep moving those goal posts.
Doesn’t look like goal-post moving to me. GP argued that AI isn’t making a difference, because if it was, we’d see amazing AI-generated open source projects. (Edit: taking a second look, that’s not exactly what GP said, but that’s what I took away from it. Obviously individuals create open source projects all the time.)
You rebutted by claiming 4% of open source contributions are AI generated.
GP countered (somewhat indirectly) by arguing that contributions don’t indicate quality, and thus wasn’t sufficient to qualify as “amazing AI-generated open source projects.”
Personally, I agree. The presence of AI contributions is not sufficient to demonstrate “amazing AI-generated open-source projects.” To demonstrate that, you’d need to point to specific projects that were largely generated by AI.
The only big AI-generated projects I’ve heard of are Steve Yegge’s GasTown and Beads, and by all accounts those are complete slop, to the point that Beads has a community dedicated to teaching people how to uninstall it. (Just hearsay. I haven’t looked into them myself.)
So at this point, I’d say the burden of proof is on you, as the original goalposts have not been met.
Edit: Or, at least, I don’t think 4% is enough to demonstrate the level of productivity GP was asking for.
Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox
#78Just to be clear, the article is NOT criticizing this. To the contrary, it's presenting it as expected , thanks to Solow's productivity paradox [1]. Which is that information technology similarly (and seemingly shockingly) didn't produce any net economic gains in the 1970's or 1980's despite all the computerization. It wasn't until the mid-to-late 1990's that information technology finally started to show clear benef…
The comparison seems flawed in terms of cost. A Claude subscription is 20 bucks per worker if using personal accounts billed to the company, which is not very far from common office tools like slack. Onboarding a worker to Claude or ChatGPT is ridiculously easy compared to teaching a 1970’s manual office worker to use an early computer. Larger implementations like automating customer service might be more costly, but…
>I think there are enough short term supposed benefits that something should be showing there.
As measured by whom? The same managers who demanded we all return to the office 5 days a week because the only way they can measure productivity is butts in seats?
Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox
#79Just to be clear, the article is NOT criticizing this. To the contrary, it's presenting it as expected , thanks to Solow's productivity paradox [1]. Which is that information technology similarly (and seemingly shockingly) didn't produce any net economic gains in the 1970's or 1980's despite all the computerization. It wasn't until the mid-to-late 1990's that information technology finally started to show clear benef…
For more on this exact topic and an answer to Solow’s Paradox, see, the excellent, The Dynamo and the Computer by Paul David [0].
[0]: https://www.almendron.com/tribuna/wp-content/uploads/2018/03...
Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox
#80The thing with a lot of white collar work is that the thinking/talking is often the majority of the work… unlike coding, where thinking is (or, used to be, pre-agent) a smaller percentage of the time consumed. Writing the software, which is essentially working through how to implement the thought, used to take a much larger percentage of the overall time consumed from thought to completion. Other white collar busines…
> unlike coding, where thinking is (or, used to be, pre-agent) a smaller percentage of the time consumed. Writing the software, which is essentially working through how to implement the thought, used to take a much larger percentage of the overall time consumed from thought to completion. huh? maybe im in the minority, but the thinking:coding has always been 80:20 spend a ton of time thinking and drawing, then write…
Yeah, ratios vary depending on how productive you are with code. For me it was 50:50 and is now 80:20, but only because I was a relatively unproductive coder (struggled with language feature memorization, etc.) and a much more productive thinker/architect.