Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

shiftmag.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 99 posts

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

#31

Post by qudat »

overgard wrote: 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.

Agreed. The bottleneck is QA/Code review and that is never going away from most corps. I've never worked at a job in tech that didn't require code review and no, asking a code agent to review a PR is never going to be "good enough".

And here we are, the central argument for why code agents are not these job killing hype beasts that are so regularly claimed.

Has anyone seen what multi-agent code workflows produce? Take a look at openclaw, the code base is an absolute disaster. 500k LoC for something that can be accomplished in 10k.

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

#32

Post by jdlshore »

This is self-reported productivity, in that devs are saying AI saves them about 4 hours per week. But let’s not forget the METR study that found a 20% increase in self-reported productivity but a 19% decrease in actual measured productivity.

(It used a clever and rigorous technique for measuring productivity differences, BTW, for anyone as skeptical of productivity measures as I am.)

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

#33

Post by zht »

blibble wrote: post #14
overgard wrote: 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"

the number of people who have heard of Amdahl's law but don't know when to use "amount of X" vs "number of Y" always shocks me as well

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

#34

Post by co_king_5 »

qudat wrote: post #31
overgard wrote: 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.

Agreed. The bottleneck is QA/Code review and that is never going away from most corps. I've never worked at a job in tech that didn't require code review and no, asking a code agent to review a PR is never going to be "good enough". And here we are, the central argument for why code agents are not these job killing hype beasts that are so regularly claimed. Has anyone seen what multi-agent code workflows produce? Tak…

[dead]

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

#35

Post by randomtoast »

moralestapia wrote: post #17

AI adoption has reduced productivity at my workplace, and by a noticeable amount!

This will lead to natural selection. As AI becomes increasingly integrated into all areas, companies that manage it less effectively than others will face greater selection pressure.

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

#36

Post by snsjzhhz »

OptionOfT wrote: post #29
ptx wrote: post #26

Apparently "AI is speeding up the onboarding process", they say. But isn't that because the onboarding process is about learning, and by having an AI regurgitate the answers you can complete the process without learning anything, which might speed it up but completely defeats the purpose?

Correct. Reading code is important. The details are in the minutia, and the way code works is that the minutia are important. Summarizing this with AI makes you lose that context.

This has been my experience as a dev, and it always confuses me when people say they prefer to work at a “higher level”. The minutiae are often just as important as some of the higher level decisions. Not everything, but not an insignificant portion either. This applies to basic things like correctness, performance, and security - craft, style, and taste are not involved.

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

#38

Post by co_king_5 »

snsjzhhz wrote: post #36
OptionOfT wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. Reading code is important. The details are in the minutia, and the way code works is that the minutia are important. Summarizing this with AI makes you lose that context.

This has been my experience as a dev, and it always confuses me when people say they prefer to work at a “higher level”. The minutiae are often just as important as some of the higher level decisions. Not everything, but not an insignificant portion either. This applies to basic things like correctness, performance, and security - craft, style, and taste are not involved.

[dead]

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

#39

Post by agentifysh »

I read this article as the CTO being the bottleneck if he's only seeing 10% productivity boost at his organization.

I dont think this is a purely AI problem more with the legacy costs of maintaining many minds that can't be solved by just giving people AI tools until the AI comes for the CTO role (but not CEO or revenue generating roles) too and whichever manager is bottlenecking.

I imagine a future where we have Nasdaq listed companies run by just a dozen people with AI agents running and talking to each other so fast that text becomes a bottleneck and they need another medium that can only be understood by an AI that will hold humans hand

This shift would also be reflected by new hardware shifts...perhaps photonic chips or anything that lets AI scale up crazy without the energy cost....

Exciting times are ahead AI but it's also accelerating digital UBI....could be good and bad.

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

#40

Post by esclerofilo »

co_king_5 wrote: post #30
esclerofilo wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time claude code runs tests or builds after a change, it's collecting training data.

[dead]

I can't pretend to know how things work internally, but I would expect it to be involved in model updates.
Post reply on HN