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

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

#41

Post by tyleo »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #10

Blunt opinion: Most devs are not that good and really only execute what they are told to do. The threat of AI for devs, and the way to drastically improve productivity is there: keep the better devs who can think systemically, who can design solutions, who can solve issues themselves and give them all the AI help available, cut the rest.

That’s how I feel too. When I was an architect at a ~300-person company, a big chunk of my job shifted to reviews, technical design docs, and guidance. I’m getting great results by feeding context like that into Claude Code, then reviewing and steering what it produces.

It really does feel like a multiplier on me and I understand things enough to get my hands dirty where Claude struggles.

Lately I’ve been wondering if that role evolves into a more hierarchical review system: senior engineers own independent modules end-to-end, and architects focus on integration, interfaces, and overall coherence. Honestly, the best parts of our product already worked like that even before AI.

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

#42

Post by ben_w »

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…

> I've never worked at a job in tech that didn't require code review

I have. Sometimes the resulting code was much worse than what you get from an LLM, and yet the project itself was still a success despite this.

I've also worked in places with code review, where the project's own code quality architecture-and-process caused it to be so late to the market it was an automatic failure.

What matters to a business is ideally identical to the business metrics, which are usually not (but sometimes are) the code metrics.

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

#43

Post by Nezteb »

agentifysh wrote: post #39

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 Nas…

> it's also accelerating digital UBI

Do you have sources for this claim?

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

#44

Post by oblio »

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…

> Take a look at openclaw, the code base is an absolute disaster. 500k LoC for something that can be accomplished in 10k.

Mission accomplished: acquhire worth probably millions and millions.

I agree with you, by the way.

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

#45

Post by mattmanser »

doomslayer999 wrote: post #13
co_king_5 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[dead]

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

In the 20 years I've been in the industry, boiler plate has dropped dramatically in the backend.

Right now, front end has tons of boiler plate. It's one of the reasons AI hassle such a wow factor for FE, trivial tasks require a lot of code.

But even that is much better than it was 10 years ago.

That was a long way of saying I disagree with your no.

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

#47

Post by onion2k »

LoganDark wrote: post #28
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> let's have LLMs check our code for correctness Lmao. Rofl even. (Testing is the one thing you would never outsource to AI.)

You don't use the LLM to check your code for correctness; you use the LLM to generate tests to exercise code paths, and verify that they do exercise those code paths.

And that test will check the code paths are run.

That doesn't tell you that the code is correct. It tells you that the branching code can reach all the branches. That isn't very useful.

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

#48

Post by raphman »

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?

Yes, that's how I'd interpret it, too.

According to the article, onboarding speed is measured as “time to the 10th Pull Request (PR).”

As we have seen on public GitHub projects, LLMs have made it really easy to submit a large number of low-effort pull requests without having any understanding of a project.

Obviously, such a kind of higher onboarding speed is not necessarily good for an organization.

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

#49

Post by ben_w »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #18
vorticalbox wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

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

I would rephrase that as "all LLMs, no matter how many you use, are only as good as one single pair of eyes".

If you're a one-person team and have no capital to spend on a proper test team, set the AI at it. If you're a megacorp with 10k full time QA testers, the AI probably isn't going to catch anything novel that the rest of them didn't, but it's cheap enough you can have it work through everything to make sure you have, actually, worked through everything.

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