> the mere fact that AI allows people to work faster It doesn't. It just lets them work less.
Those mean the same thing.
Strange then that we have separate words for speed and quantity.
The AI Productivity Illusion
21–30 of 31 posts
Re: The AI Productivity Illusion
#22Over the last year I have seen an astonishing spike in poor-quality output within multiple employers. The problem with AI coding, ticket filing, etc is that you must review it afterward, but review would take nearly as long as just doing it yourself. The 10x productivity gain becomes 1.05x. The adopted solution to this, to meet internal targets, is to accept reduced quality. Flood the ticketing system with bogus repo…
> But, most ICs are measured by tickets closed, commits pushed, lines of code written, and tokens used.
Tokens used? That's a cost. One might as well include coffees drunk.
Re: The AI Productivity Illusion
#23Over the last year I have seen an astonishing spike in poor-quality output within multiple employers. The problem with AI coding, ticket filing, etc is that you must review it afterward, but review would take nearly as long as just doing it yourself. The 10x productivity gain becomes 1.05x. The adopted solution to this, to meet internal targets, is to accept reduced quality. Flood the ticketing system with bogus repo…
I think it actually ends up a negative net gain. The slop ends up taking more time and energy than it brings in value. Everyone is working harder, but the result is an even bigger pile of cards waiting for the wind to shift.
Re: The AI Productivity Illusion
#24Over the last year I have seen an astonishing spike in poor-quality output within multiple employers. The problem with AI coding, ticket filing, etc is that you must review it afterward, but review would take nearly as long as just doing it yourself. The 10x productivity gain becomes 1.05x. The adopted solution to this, to meet internal targets, is to accept reduced quality. Flood the ticketing system with bogus repo…
> But, most ICs are measured by tickets closed, commits pushed, lines of code written, and tokens used. Tokens used? That's a cost . One might as well include coffees drunk.
Tell that to management.
Re: The AI Productivity Illusion
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those mean the same thing.
Strange then that we have separate words for speed and quantity.
If I can do something faster or I can do something with less effort, those are both the same productivity increases. It’s just the how the human involved wants to spend the increase.
Re: The AI Productivity Illusion
#26Over the last year I have seen an astonishing spike in poor-quality output within multiple employers. The problem with AI coding, ticket filing, etc is that you must review it afterward, but review would take nearly as long as just doing it yourself. The 10x productivity gain becomes 1.05x. The adopted solution to this, to meet internal targets, is to accept reduced quality. Flood the ticketing system with bogus repo…
Insightful point, but we should also consider we are in a very transitory period where were are adjusting every level of these tools (how verbose? How sycophantic? What should it ignore, which details matter, etc.) And more importantly, we as users are becoming attuned to reading and gaining understanding with AI.
When everyone first uses AI they are swayed by its intelligent sounding sentence construction. It took time to be able to look past that and understand basic assuptions still needed to be questioned.
Re: The AI Productivity Illusion
#27This particular phrase captured my attention: > Productivity Is About (Much) More than Finishing Tasks Quickly I read something similar in the book The Goal from Eliyahu Goldratt more than 20 year ago. You can be highly productive and yet produce nothing of value.
> You can be highly productive and yet produce nothing of value. I'm sorry, but this is nonsense. Yes, you can produce nothing of 'traditional' value whilst still being productive in some way , but you 100% can not be 'highly productive' when you don't produce anything of value. Sitting around and jacking off all day is not as productive as working on some unmonetizable project. The value can be in many aspects of th…
No offense, but it sounds like you just skipped reading the blog and jumped right to the comment section.
The blog post is literally about various measures that seem "productive" but don't seem to be creating any value.
Re: The AI Productivity Illusion
#28Over the last year I have seen an astonishing spike in poor-quality output within multiple employers. The problem with AI coding, ticket filing, etc is that you must review it afterward, but review would take nearly as long as just doing it yourself. The 10x productivity gain becomes 1.05x. The adopted solution to this, to meet internal targets, is to accept reduced quality. Flood the ticketing system with bogus repo…
I think it actually ends up a negative net gain. The slop ends up taking more time and energy than it brings in value. Everyone is working harder, but the result is an even bigger pile of cards waiting for the wind to shift.
I wrote this back in 2023, and I think it holds
“After compiling all these, it still seems neutral to net negative. Maybe a net positive on the customer service side.“
Re: The AI Productivity Illusion
#29I can do a nice task with AI but can't easily schedule it. Enterprise controls make what could be a simple cron job into a nearly impossible scheduled task. So AI has to be one shot for me where I use it. So productivity is dramatically lower if I have to manually track and execute tasks as some kind of human scheduler system.
Claude has a scheduler; have you tried it?
Re: The AI Productivity Illusion
#30If you work twice as fast but don't add a single $ to your income then you haven't increased productivity at all.