Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel LLMs save me time too but I worry my perceptions don't match the reality. Got some data?
>> Got some data? There is nothing I could say that would convince a skeptic.
Or a believer.
AI coding tools make developers slower but they think they're faster study finds
21–30 of 40 posts
Re: AI coding tools make developers slower but they think they're faster study finds
#22With all due respect to the people who have studied this, I do not care. I'm relatively young, and yet the pain of typing has started to become unmistakeable and chipped away at my productivity, motivation, and sense of invincibility. You could tell me AI coding makes me 50% slower. I'm taking it. I refuse to grind my wrists to dust.
Try using AI in a useful manner then, as a voice or shorthand input method.
Re: AI coding tools make developers slower but they think they're faster study finds
#23I want to believe that this is true. But I don't.
They tested it with 16 developers, so not enough data for conclusive evidence.
If any of those 16 developers were at the by some allegedly 20x productivity with AI models it would have been positive on average, but none were even close to that.
So I feel its fairly safe to say that models aren't even close to 10x productivity gain for average developers, so developer jobs are not really in jeopardy so far. If it was easy to be more productive with AI models then this study would have found that, the only productivity gain this study could have missed would be if it was really hard or if the gain was really small, and both of those means it wont replace most developers.
Re: AI coding tools make developers slower but they think they're faster study finds
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> Got some data? There is nothing I could say that would convince a skeptic.
You could repeatedly have developers execute tasks with and without ai (two different tasks. Each subject does the same 2 tasks. Randomize order and what task is done with and what task is done without ai) and show significant differences in duration. You’d need probably at least 30 to 40 people (there’s ways to estimate this, but this is gut feeling from years ago when I did studies like this) It would take on a few…
Didn't this study do that and proved the skeptics right? It is hard to convince skeptics when the skeptics are right.
Re: AI coding tools make developers slower but they think they're faster study finds
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> Got some data? There is nothing I could say that would convince a skeptic.
You could repeatedly have developers execute tasks with and without ai (two different tasks. Each subject does the same 2 tasks. Randomize order and what task is done with and what task is done without ai) and show significant differences in duration. You’d need probably at least 30 to 40 people (there’s ways to estimate this, but this is gut feeling from years ago when I did studies like this) It would take on a few…
I have no interest in convincing skeptics. They’re welcome to do as they choose. Computing and programming should be about pleasing yourself and programming in the way you like.
Re: AI coding tools make developers slower but they think they're faster study finds
#26No. Way. AI is much Faster than I will ever be at debugging, and idea generation. It's not about working faster or slower, it's getting it right in the most efficient way possible.
AI just produces very bad but working versions every time I try. Worse performance, more technical debt that I need to refactor, more code overall with less functionality that I need to trim away.
It gets a flawed but working version quicker, but it takes much longer to get to anything I can release.
AI mostly helps me discover new thing about a public API, or show one general solution to a problem, but then I mostly have to solve everything myself anyway to get anything good.
Re: AI coding tools make developers slower but they think they're faster study finds
#27With all due respect to the people who have studied this, I do not care. I'm relatively young, and yet the pain of typing has started to become unmistakeable and chipped away at my productivity, motivation, and sense of invincibility. You could tell me AI coding makes me 50% slower. I'm taking it. I refuse to grind my wrists to dust.
I'll chip in with another datapoint that a seriously ergonomic keyboard helped me as well - in my case, the glove80. Expensive, and there might be a better option on the Pareto curve, but I got freaked out, bought the most ergonomic keyboard I could find, and it did solve my problem.
I've heard good things about voice typing with Talon too, but never tried it.
Re: AI coding tools make developers slower but they think they're faster study finds
#28My personal experience is that in well and quickly autocompleted languages I know well (python) then I am roughly the same speed, I'd say...it's just a bit less annoying having AI do simple boilerplate for me, but sometimes annoying whenever I try to use it for larger refactoring where it gets style and structure incorrect.
In languages and libraries I know less well - vuejs+myriad of (especially) js libraries, I would say I'm much faster, especially as I delegate more style and structure to the AI.
Re: AI coding tools make developers slower but they think they're faster study finds
#29Lots of HN discussion here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44522772 - it's an interesting paper but there are reasons we shouldn't make strong claims from it. I would say the most accurate reading would be "experienced developers but inexperienced Cursor users overestimate their immediate productivity gains".
Re: AI coding tools make developers slower but they think they're faster study finds
#30Ironically, this fell off the HN front page without enough upvotes...neither hackernews.coffee nor Claude suggested it to me...