AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox • Hacker News Board

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#341

Post by jdasdf » Wed, Feb 18, 2026, 9:06 AM UTC

Retric wrote: post #251

wiseowise wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a phase, I’d argue that 90% of modern jobs are bullshit to keep cattle occupied and economy rolling.

Jobs you don’t notice or understand often look pointless. HR on the surface seems unimportant, but you’d notice if the company stopped having health insurance or sending your taxes to the IRS etc etc. In the end when jobs are done right they seem to disappear. We notice crappy software or a poorly done HVAC system not clean carpets.

> HR on the surface seems unimportant, but you’d notice if the company stopped having health insurance or sending your taxes to the IRS etc etc.

Interesting on how the very example you give for "oh this job isn't really bullshit" ultimately ends up being useless for the business itself, and exists only as a result of regulation.

No, health insurance being provided by employers, or tax withholding aren't useful things for anyone, except for the state who now offloads its costs onto private businesses.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#342

Post by vagrantstreet » Wed, Feb 18, 2026, 9:07 AM UTC

Perhaps something went wrong along the career path of a developer? Personally during my education there is a severe lack of actual coding done mid lectures, especially any sort of showcase of tools that are available. We didn't even get taught how to use debuggers, I see late year students still struggle how to do basic navigation in a terminal.

And the biggest irony is that the "scariest" projects we had at our university ended up being maybe 500-1000 lines of code, things really must go back to hands on programming with real time feedback from a teacher. LLM's only output what you ask and won't really suggest concepts used by professionals unless you go out of your way to ask for it, it all seems like a vicious cycle even though meaningful code blocks can range along 5 to 100 lines which. When I use LLM's I just get information burn out trying to dig through all that info or code

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#343

Post by sensanaty » Wed, Feb 18, 2026, 9:09 AM UTC

famouswaffles wrote: post #145

jdlshore wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's not a great ask. Who's going to quantify what is 'amazing open source work'? 4% for a single tool used in a particular way (many are out there using AI tools in a way that doesn't make it clear the code was AI authored) is an incredible amount. Don't see how you can look at that and see 'not enough'. The vast majority of people using these tools aren't announcing it to the world. Why would they ? They use it, it…

So we're suddenly going back into measuring lines of code as a useful metric?

Just because people are shitting out endless slop code that they never bothered to throw a 2nd glance at doesn't mean it'sgood or that it's leading to better projects or tools, it literally just means people are pushing code out haphazardly . If I made a python script that everyone started using and all it did was create a repo, commit a README and push it every 5 seconds we'd be seeing billions of lines of code added! But none of it is useful in any way.

Same with AI, sure we're generating endless piles of code, but how much of it is actually leading to better software?

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#344

Post by dns_snek » Wed, Feb 18, 2026, 9:09 AM UTC

inglor_cz wrote: post #325

tehjoker wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an important function in a capitalist economy. Socialist economies are like "adblock for your life". That said, some advertising can be useful to inform consumers that a good exists, but convincing them they need it by synthesizing desires or fighting off competitors? Useless and socially detrimental.

"Socialist economies are like "adblock for your life"." Ever actually lived in anything approaching one? Yeah, if the stores are empty, it does not make sense to produce ads for stuff that isn't there ... ... but we still had ads on TV, surprisingly, even for stuff that was in shortage (= almost everything). Why? Because the Plan said so, and disrespecting the Plan too openly would stray dangerously close to the crim…

None of that is inherent to socialism. There can be good and bad management, freedom and authoritarianism in any economic system.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#345

Post by al_borland » Wed, Feb 18, 2026, 9:11 AM UTC

koiueo wrote: post #336

al_borland wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When my company first started pushing for devs to use AI, the most senior guy on my team was pretty vocal about coding not being the bottleneck that slowed down work. It was an I/O issue, and maybe a caching issue as well from too many projects going at the same time with no focus… which also makes the I/O issues worse.

So how is it going for him? Was he able to prove his point?

He was laid off… unrelated to these opinions.

He was correct though. For example, I’ve been waiting over a month for another team to set me up so I can test something they wanted me to develop. I’ve followed up multiple times. AI coding tools aren’t going to solve my blocker.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#346

Post by hackable_sand » Wed, Feb 18, 2026, 9:12 AM UTC

coffeebeqn wrote: post #300

bazmattaz wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My manager mentioned that his manager (an executive) is not happy because the org we are in are not using as much tokens as other orgs in the company. Pretty wild

Just have Claude code churn out some Harry Potter fan fiction for an hour a day and you’ll meet your KPI easily

It could literally be internal marketing fan fiction on the org's intent to meet KPI's with a focus on synergistic evolution towards x-functional singularity between department hiveminds including a footer on projected outcomes for operational efficiency.

I think LinkedIn is in the dataset, right?

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#347

Post by mark_l_watson » Wed, Feb 18, 2026, 9:13 AM UTC

vjk800 wrote: post #296

My experience has been that AI is much more useful on my own systems than on company systems. For AI to (currently) be useful, I need to choose my own tooling and LLM models to support AI centered workflow. At work, I have to use whatever (usually Microsoft) tools my company has chosen to purchase and approve for my corporate computer, and usually nothing works as well as on my own machine where I get to set it up as…

I agree with you, but then I am retired so my opinion is not that relevant.

I have a sweet spot for using just Emacs, no other IDEs except very occasional use of AntiGravity. For a particular fun project or researching how to use generative models in applications, I like to start low: see if a small local model with appropriate tool use or agentic library will get the job done, if not move up to using something cheap like gemini-3-flash, and only if none of these approaches work, then use an expensive model.

I was advising a friend’s company last month on their application that effectively uses LLM models, but I was blown away by their zeal to spend lots of money on tokens.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#348

Post by delaminator » Wed, Feb 18, 2026, 9:14 AM UTC

torben-friis wrote: post #42

crazygringo wrote: post #21

Just 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…

You still need to teach a 2020s employee how to use Claude.

- protect yourself from data loss / secret leaks - what it can and can't do - trust issues & hallucinations - Can't just enable Claude for Excel and expect people to become Excel wizards.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#349

Post by kittbuilds » Wed, Feb 18, 2026, 9:14 AM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #21

Just 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…

[dead]

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#350

Post by jstummbillig » Wed, Feb 18, 2026, 9:15 AM UTC

torben-friis wrote: post #42

crazygringo wrote: post #21

Just 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 see no reason to believe that just handing a Claude subscription to everyone in a company simply creates economic benefit. I don't think it's easier than "automating customer service". It's actually very strange.

I think it could definitely already create economic benefit, after someone instructed clearly how to use it and how to integrate it in your work. Most people are really not good at figuring that out on their own, in a busy workday, when left to their own devices and companies are just finding out where the ball is moving and what to organize around too.

So I can totally see a lot of failed experiments and people slowly figuring stuff out, and all of that not translating to measurable surpluses in a corp, in a setup similar to what OP laid out.