161–170 of 174 posts
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Is it? Genuine question. Say you didn't do these things at all -- what would that change to your life? Are you gaining productivity in high-impact things, or stuff that might scratch an itch but you don't really need all things considered?
Productivity is a measure of progress towards a goal, not a judgment of whether that goal is worth pursuing.
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> it's trivial to see that if you tell a frontier model to do a coding task, it usually does it well enough So you do not disagree? You agree 100%? Yes, it is trivial to see. Hence my near-anaphylactic reaction to articles like this, which specifically claim that it is NOT useful. Do you just mentally filter that out or something? > Is [..] the codebase and my brain's relation to it is in a better state than if I had…
> I think that anyone planting a big flag at 0 (no AI) in 2026, with what we have available, is indeed doing it for emotional reasons I just think there is a possibility that being on the AI spectrum is not necessarily better than being at 0. Maybe retaining maximal understanding is better in the long run, even better than minimal, supervised AI usage. Productivity in the long run might be better without it, we just…
It's just not plausible to me that we don't find some way to leverage all that power without fatally undermining everything we're otherwise trying to achieve long-term. It's not plausible to me that skilled, knowledgeable developers like you would ever conclude that AI was never useful, always harmful, and that it is critical to the project's long-term health that you must do this 2,000-file internal refactor entirely by hand.
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Tell me, when the dot com bubble burst, and all those debt-laden companies collapsed and had buyouts and mergers, was the internet turned off?
Internet existed before dot com bubble.
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Internet existed before dot com bubble.
And AI existed before, and will continue after, the rise and/or fall of any particular company.
Dot com bubble was not about the internet. Internet only facilitated it.
This is where I find it lacking: 1. I am not yet convinced that I am more productive with AI for complex tasks. But, I am fairly certain for trivial tasks, or bureaucratic tasks AI has lessened my cognitive load (data point of one). 2. Does AI run on money, or does it run on energy? Money is the means by which we facilitate exchange. But in reality, the energy in the universe is ginormous. The fundamental thing to ke…
That can't justify the 1+ trillion invested in AI, right?
> Money is the means by which we facilitate exchange. But in reality, the energy in the universe is ginormous. > Is AI bad for the environment or is it the way we obtain energy bad for the environment?
I find this dishonest, we know that it's running on natural gas mostly and it's thus contributing to climate change + harm for communities. There's no way around this.
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Sure, it's cheating if you want to frame it like that. But it's still a huge boost in productivity.
Is it? Genuine question. Say you didn't do these things at all -- what would that change to your life? Are you gaining productivity in high-impact things, or stuff that might scratch an itch but you don't really need all things considered?
Sure, let me give you an example. I bought an Xteink X4 recently so I always have something to read with me. I have a huge dump of epubs from Humble Bundle and other sources. I used to just copy them to my e-book readers and then never read anything because it's impossible to find.
I had Claude write a Python script that sorts the books into a file system structure according to Language → Genre → Sub-Genre → Author. Now the device is actually useful, because I can easily find whatever book I want to read, and it has resulted in my reading much more.
> Are you gaining productivity in high-impact things, or stuff that might scratch an itch but you don't really need all things considered?
I technically don't need much. You could lock me in a room and give me stale bread and water once a day. So I'm not sure why you're applying that standard to the usefulness of LLMs, and I'm not sure what you consider "high-impact things". I'm doing high-impact things for me, but maybe you disagree.
So let me ask you this instead: did you write these types of comments in the past, when people manually built software? If I manually wrote a Python script to sort my books, would you post a comment questioning whether that changed anything in my life?
A lot of the criticism leveled against using LLMs in software development is just criticism against software development in general. Do we really need all this software? I guess not. Can we objectively measure the productivity of software developers? Not really.
Every step is part of the journey of realising the productivity gains. If you want to, you can automate every step, and you won't just get a little faster. However, at the moment, the gains of being more productive when writing code are still eaten up by more time-consuming tasks like analysing bugs or having to solve organizational issues.
So it will take a while (and I think that is a good thing) until productivity gains are fully visible. For me, it is currently at work as if I had twice the amount of time I had in the past, because many of the repetitive tasks can be done much faster with AI. It is a bit like 60% of the tasks can be done in 10% of the time. But it already took me a few weeks to assemble MCP servers for many of the systems I use (in a responsible manner).
Even though I have a lot of fun building AI systems, I am very worried about the future of work, because I have the feeling that politics is busy with other drama instead of finding solutions for the time when corporations won't need human capital anymore.
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I do not think that wishful thinking is assumption that rapidly evolving hardware which is currently one of the bottlenecks in high demand would become faster in the future.
This isn't how it works. Hundreds of billions are spend on existing NVIDIA AI hardware that must first be recuperated. This kind of speculation doesn't make sense to me.
A substantial portion of this hardware is also being used for rapid model development rather than simply operating existing models and building a stable revenue stream. These companies are focused primarily on training and improving the models, not merely running them, which is significantly cheaper.
> Meanwhile, a study (late 2025) seems to report that although participating developers felt they completed tasks faster using AI, they where around 19% slower. METR reran the study early this year and, while they caveat it, this time they found a speedup, which is consistent with subjective estimates of productivity also having increased -- the simplest explanation is that subjective estimates exaggerate, but there'…
> Meanwhile, a study (late 2025) seems to report that although participating developers felt they completed tasks faster using AI, they where around 19% slower. METR reran the study early this year and, while they caveat it, this time they found a speedup, which is consistent with subjective estimates of productivity also having increased -- the simplest explanation is that subjective estimates exaggerate, but there'…
By now, anyone writing articles in 2026 but ignoring the 2026 study is either intentionally trying to mislead people, or so uninformed on the topic that they're just regurgitating old anti-AI content. If you want to talk about studies, we need to be talking about current studies with current tools. Not studies about how the situation was in the past with different tools.
Is a bit hard. But I agree that the field is moving very fast and that it is hard to find studies that are up to date on the latest tooling.