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The AI Productivity Gap

bjorg.bjornroche.com

11–20 of 127 posts

Re: The AI Productivity Gap

#11
post #8

Based on personal observation, a lot of productivity has been thrown out of the window with unneeded refactoring, rewrites and "what-if" scenarios that the AI agent will spot.

"... unneeded refactoring, rewrites and "what-if" scenarios ..."

Like so many senior developers I have encountered. That stuff is good for CV.

Re: The AI Productivity Gap

#12

What I have noticed in my own work that a lot of the time that used to be for coding is now just waiting. I have three agents working on three different features in parallel, and I'll go back and forth with all of them, correcting things and steering etc, but then I find myself with three busy agents and nothing to myself except stare at the screen while they code away. There is a mental budget for me where I can't h…

This has been my observation too. Because I'm chatting it feels like I'm not working, so any output can be "productive" in that context but I'm hyper aware of all the negative time here. Correcting, pushing it back to the prompt, reminding it that it doesn't have full context so do what I told you not what you think, and then verifying it and correcting it (always) seems to take longer than just doing the work myself

Re: The AI Productivity Gap

#13
I've had similar conversations with a client recently while discussing estimates for a large project. Senior leadership has a mental model where AI makes everything X% faster, but that's very wrong. Some things get sped up by an insane amount and basically go to zero, some others not so much. Entirely new tasks emerge, such as directing agents to provide them the context they need, setting loops, etc.

It's a very O-ring problem.

Re: The AI Productivity Gap

#14
post #6

What I have noticed in my own work that a lot of the time that used to be for coding is now just waiting. I have three agents working on three different features in parallel, and I'll go back and forth with all of them, correcting things and steering etc, but then I find myself with three busy agents and nothing to myself except stare at the screen while they code away. There is a mental budget for me where I can't h…

I stopped using coding agents after more than one and a half year of active use, it really started to become way too boring, and I’m t a point where I just hate having to babysit them and for the 200th time make it understand what the actual goal is… and to be honest, going back to writing code by hand without assistance is really hard at first you continuously have that little voice telling you how simple that would…

I'd be really interested to see all the software that is written by agents. Whenever I touch agents or ai I can't get much use out of them. My understanding is the value when I think aloud with them/treat them as a better google search, but thats about it. Except one off web stuff, that is a pretty neat use case.

But lets be real, anything moderately complex that is out of the domain of publicly available sample code is hit or miss compared to the time invested running the loop. I'd much rather invest the time in myself.

What a lot of people don't talk about is the inherent security nightmare of trusting ai agents and the sheer data exfiltration happening behind the scenes.

Re: The AI Productivity Gap

#15
Based on personal experience on a specific project, that 1.5 hours with AI let me accomplish work planned for a man-week in the pre-AI era. So it’s much more than 3x.

Re: The AI Productivity Gap

#16
post #6

What I have noticed in my own work that a lot of the time that used to be for coding is now just waiting. I have three agents working on three different features in parallel, and I'll go back and forth with all of them, correcting things and steering etc, but then I find myself with three busy agents and nothing to myself except stare at the screen while they code away. There is a mental budget for me where I can't h…

I stopped using coding agents after more than one and a half year of active use, it really started to become way too boring, and I’m t a point where I just hate having to babysit them and for the 200th time make it understand what the actual goal is… and to be honest, going back to writing code by hand without assistance is really hard at first you continuously have that little voice telling you how simple that would…

Neither of these points feel true anymore.

Models are very much predictable these days (except anthropic models). The real issue stems from letting them work on their own for far too long. Also we are not controlled by 2 companies anymore as kimi k3, deepseek flash (and soon pro) as the ultra-cheap variants, glm 5.2 especially is a direct replacement for opus 4.8.

Models will only get better and cheaper I wouldn't feel too pessimistic and wouldn't feel too bad on relying on them to accelerate work and free up mental space from menial tasks.

As a personal side-note I never let my agents do architectual design I only use them for implementing. I always found the actual coding part of programming extremely boring and coming up with designs, experimenting and testing the fun part.

Re: The AI Productivity Gap

#17
Writing code is a small part of everyday's job of a software engineer. The article's table reflects this fairly well.

AI compresses implementation time for an individual engineer, but architecture decisions, design reviews, integration, testing, deployment, and production validation remain largely serial activities. If code generation speeds up by 5x while those bottlenecks don't, you've mostly increased the team's work queue rather than its throughput.

With the current capabilities, models still need constant babysitting and course correction. An engineer who lacks the skills to guide them can end up creating more work for the rest of the team. AI makes it easy to generate code faster than you can understand it, and that cost is paid during code review, debugging, and maintenance by colleagues, whose confidence in that engineer's skills may be affected by his use of AI.

What looks like a productivity gain for one engineer can become a productivity loss for the team as a whole.

Re: The AI Productivity Gap

#18

What I have noticed in my own work that a lot of the time that used to be for coding is now just waiting. I have three agents working on three different features in parallel, and I'll go back and forth with all of them, correcting things and steering etc, but then I find myself with three busy agents and nothing to myself except stare at the screen while they code away. There is a mental budget for me where I can't h…

I find myself in the same situation, baby sitting AI agent, monitoring them. It's like l've become a coordinator.

Re: The AI Productivity Gap

#19

Writing code is a small part of everyday's job of a software engineer. The article's table reflects this fairly well. AI compresses implementation time for an individual engineer, but architecture decisions, design reviews, integration, testing, deployment, and production validation remain largely serial activities. If code generation speeds up by 5x while those bottlenecks don't, you've mostly increased the team's w…

Perfect summary of what's going on today

Re: The AI Productivity Gap

#20
post #5

Pre AI and Post AI code review hours are both 0.75 in this made up example. I find that implausible. Even with the same amount of code, AI code is less trustworthy* and requires more attention... but we know it won't be the same amount, it will be more. This means it will take longer to review, or there will be unforeseen consequences of not spending that extra time. *meaning no human eyes have looked at it and said…

The hard part is that LLM code looks like there is some sort of flow. It is like a nice statistical smooth flow. It looks very convincing at a glance. No one would write code like that and not know what they are doing comments self assured and all.
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