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AI saves about 3% of your hours, and almost none of it reaches the money

okaneland.com

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Re: AI saves about 3% of your hours, and almost none of it reaches the money

#31

Post by tonyhart7 »

badgersnake wrote: post #28
hackmack10 wrote: post #20

This article is probably not accurate. AI allows me to create hugely complex apps. Apps that I mostly don't understand the underlying code but can evaluate that it works fairly quick and effectively. That said, in the corporate world, it's not that easy. There are tons of hoops to jump through and context switching all day long. So while my code is 100% AI generated these days, and I can make extremely complicated ap…

> Apps that I mostly don't understand the underlying code So you’re just flinging tokens at the wall until something sticks. That’s not engineering.

You be surprise if people didnt do that

Re: AI saves about 3% of your hours, and almost none of it reaches the money

#32

Post by slopinthebag »

suddenlybananas wrote: post #19
kstenerud wrote: post #9

Calling bullshit on this. The size of projects I've done in the past year compared to before is mind boggling. There is NO way I could have reached this level of productivity without a properly trained and properly prompted LLM.

Like what

Their tool for sandboxing AI agents, probably.

Re: AI saves about 3% of your hours, and almost none of it reaches the money

#33

Post by jmcgough »

chapel wrote: post #6

Read the first paragraph could tell it was AI written. Maybe if it was hand edited to be less AI I would have read more but it looked like the laziest Claude prose. That'll be a no from me dawg.

Doesn't read like it's AI-written to me.

Re: AI saves about 3% of your hours, and almost none of it reaches the money

#34

Post by kenhwang »

Gagarin1917 wrote: post #23

>And in coding specifically, the speedup is real and comes with its own bill. Oh so this article isn’t really about where AI spending is actually happening. I HOPE people aren’t spending money on AI writing emails. That’s definitely not worth it. Companies are spending the most on coding tools, not email writing. That’s the main value proposition right now. It also doesn’t get into media generation and industries tha…

> I HOPE people aren’t spending money on AI writing emails. That’s definitely not worth it.

The engineers use the coding AI for everything they don't like to do that distracts them from doing what they like to do. So that's certainly a lot of writing emails, status updates, meeting notes, journaling, Slack messages, and prettifying slide presentations and so so so many docs.

So if you're aghast that hundreds of dollars of AI tokens per engineer per month is being spent on writing emails, you should be even more offended that the more expensive human engineer time used to be wasted on those tasks.

Re: AI saves about 3% of your hours, and almost none of it reaches the money

#35

Post by SoftTalker »

jmcgough wrote: post #33
chapel wrote: post #6

Read the first paragraph could tell it was AI written. Maybe if it was hand edited to be less AI I would have read more but it looked like the laziest Claude prose. That'll be a no from me dawg.

Doesn't read like it's AI-written to me.

I'm 50:50 on it. It's either AI written or written by someone who writes like an LLM does.

Re: AI saves about 3% of your hours, and almost none of it reaches the money

#36

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

Gagarin1917 wrote: post #23

>And in coding specifically, the speedup is real and comes with its own bill. Oh so this article isn’t really about where AI spending is actually happening. I HOPE people aren’t spending money on AI writing emails. That’s definitely not worth it. Companies are spending the most on coding tools, not email writing. That’s the main value proposition right now. It also doesn’t get into media generation and industries tha…

This comment is odd given that it's high on opinion without ever refuting the actual data given in the article.

Like it or not, many business people spend hours a day writing emails. The article pointed out specific data showing AI could reduce these hours spent while raising quality.

I'll take the article's actual data and research over your data-free spouts of "That's definitely not worth it" and "Useless".

Re: AI saves about 3% of your hours, and almost none of it reaches the money

#37

Post by bayarearefugee »

hackmack10 wrote: post #20

This article is probably not accurate. AI allows me to create hugely complex apps. Apps that I mostly don't understand the underlying code but can evaluate that it works fairly quick and effectively. That said, in the corporate world, it's not that easy. There are tons of hoops to jump through and context switching all day long. So while my code is 100% AI generated these days, and I can make extremely complicated ap…

> This article is probably not accurate. AI allows me to create hugely complex apps.

To prove the article wrong even within the context of AI coding (which wasnt the focus of the article) you would have to present proof that creating these new AI apps resulted in you making lots of new money.

Re: AI saves about 3% of your hours, and almost none of it reaches the money

#38

Post by yawnxyz »

jmcgough wrote: post #33
chapel wrote: post #6

Read the first paragraph could tell it was AI written. Maybe if it was hand edited to be less AI I would have read more but it looked like the laziest Claude prose. That'll be a no from me dawg.

Doesn't read like it's AI-written to me.

there's plenty of tells, e.g. "how to actually bank the part that is real" — AI tends to just "throw words out there" with very little information density

you COULD create a writer/reviewer loop hook to catch and rewrite sentences like this, but almost no one does

the result is usually very long essays that say very little (kind of like in grade school where we're graded on "length" so we just add words as filler)

Re: AI saves about 3% of your hours, and almost none of it reaches the money

#39

Post by badgersnake »

tonyhart7 wrote: post #31
badgersnake wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apps that I mostly don't understand the underlying code So you’re just flinging tokens at the wall until something sticks. That’s not engineering.

You be surprise if people didnt do that

I’m not surprised. Of course people take shortcuts. They did it before LLMs came around.

If you don’t understand the output you don’t get to judge the quality.

Re: AI saves about 3% of your hours, and almost none of it reaches the money

#40

Post by strangescript »

joe_the_user wrote: post #8
peter422 wrote: post #5

A year ago AI wrote roughly 0% of my code and now it writes roughly 100%. Which is to say any AI study from a year ago is fairly out of date with the speed of advancement.

The study is two months old (March 13, 2026). Edit: Also, it's about writing not coding and it's point isn't that time isn't saved but even with time saved at the task, you don't get a broad decrease in total worked time for many/most workers.

The study is "new", but the data they are using is old. It has references GPT-4 for god sake.
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