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Productivity gains from AI coding assistants haven’t budged past 10% – survey

shiftmag.dev

11–20 of 99 posts

Re: Productivity gains from AI coding assistants haven’t budged past 10% – survey

#11

I think that over time people will start looking at AI-assisted coding the same way we now look at loosely typed code, or at (heavy) frameworks: it saves time in the short term, but may cause significant problems down the line. Whether or not this tradeoff makes sense in a specific situation is a matter of debate, and there's usually no obviously right or wrong answer.

Once the free money runs out, the AI cos may shift to making heavily verified code snippets with more direct language control. This will heavily simplify a lot of boilerplate instead of fairytales of some AGI coding wiz.

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Re: Productivity gains from AI coding assistants haven’t budged past 10% – survey

#12
I think some AI companies are just now starting to feel the pressure to profit.

Soon, I predict we will see a pretty significant jump in price that will make a 10% productivity gain seem tiny compared to the associated bills.

For now, these companies are trying to reach critical mass so their users are so dependant on their tech that they have to keep paying at least in the short term.

Re: Productivity gains from AI coding assistants haven’t budged past 10% – survey

#13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once the free money runs out, the AI cos may shift to making heavily verified code snippets with more direct language control. This will heavily simplify a lot of boilerplate instead of fairytales of some AGI coding wiz.

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No to the first question, and maybe with a lot of money for the second question.

Re: Productivity gains from AI coding assistants haven’t budged past 10% – survey

#14
post #5

You're only as fast as your biggest bottleneck. Adding AI to an existing organization is just going to show you where your bottlenecks are, it's not going to magically make them go away. For most companies, the speed of writing code probably wasn't the bottleneck in the first place.

the amount of people that work in technology and have never heard of amdahl's law always shocks me

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law

a 100% increase in coding speed means I then I get to spend an extra 30 minutes a week in meetings

while now hating my job, because the only fun bit has been removed

"progress"

Re: Productivity gains from AI coding assistants haven’t budged past 10% – survey

#15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once the free money runs out, the AI cos may shift to making heavily verified code snippets with more direct language control. This will heavily simplify a lot of boilerplate instead of fairytales of some AGI coding wiz.

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It seems like they should be able to “overweight” newer training data. But the risk is the newer training data is going to skew more towards AI slop than older training data.

Re: Productivity gains from AI coding assistants haven’t budged past 10% – survey

#16
Unsurprising for multiple reasons. Most organizations have other bottlenecks and limiting factors than “how fast can you develop”.

Regardless, if you’re a dev who is now 2x as productive in terms of work completed per day, and quality remains stable, why should this translate to 2x the output? Most people are paid by the hour and not for outcomes.

And yes, I am suggesting that if you complete in 4 hours that which took you 8 hours in 2019, that you should consider calling it a day.

Re: Productivity gains from AI coding assistants haven’t budged past 10% – survey

#18
post #5

You're only as fast as your biggest bottleneck. Adding AI to an existing organization is just going to show you where your bottlenecks are, it's not going to magically make them go away. For most companies, the speed of writing code probably wasn't the bottleneck in the first place.

one thing that aways slowed me down was writing jsdocs and testing. Now i can write one example of a pass and then get codex to read the code and write a test for all the branches in that section saves time as it can type a lot faster than i can and its mostly copying the example i already have but changing the input to hit all the branches.

> let's have LLMs check our code for correctness

Lmao. Rofl even.

(Testing is the one thing you would never outsource to AI.)

Re: Productivity gains from AI coding assistants haven’t budged past 10% – survey

#19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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It seems like they should be able to “overweight” newer training data. But the risk is the newer training data is going to skew more towards AI slop than older training data.

There won't ever be newer training data.

The OG data came from sites like Stackoverflow. These sites will stop existing once LLMs become better and easier to use. Game over.

Re: Productivity gains from AI coding assistants haven’t budged past 10% – survey

#20

I found the title for this post misleading. To clarify it a bit, AI has only improved productivity by 10% even though 93% of devs are using it.

Yeah, the title may suggest that productivity is still 10% out of 100% after CEOs fired half of developers believing that the rest will do all the job with the help of AI.
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