Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI coding tools can reduce productivity

secondthoughts.ai

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 284 posts

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#211

Post by Brendinooo »

The article brushed aside devs being terrible at estimates, but I dunno.

I'm a frontend guy, been using Claude Code for a couple of weeks now. It's been able to speed up some boilerplate, it's sped up a lot of "naming is hard" conversations I like to have (but my coworkers probably don't, lol), it's enabled me to do a lot more stuff in my most recent project.

But for a task or two I suspect that it has slowed me down. If I'm unable to articulate the problem well enough and the problem is hard enough you can go in circles for awhile. And I think the nature of "the right answer is just around the corner" makes it hard to timebox or find a specific point where you say "yup, time to ditch this and do it the old-fashioned way". There is a bit of a slot-machine effect here.

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#212

Post by danielbln »

newswasboring wrote: post #145
benreesman wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find the swings to be wild, when you win with it, you win really big. But when you lose with it, it's a real bite out of your week too. And I think 10x to 20x has to be figurative right, you can do 20x by volume maybe, but to borrow an expression from Steve Ballmer, that's like measuring an airplane by kilograms. Someone already operating at the very limit of their abilities doing stuff that is for them high comple…

> Someone already operating at the very limit of their abilities doing stuff that is for them high complexity, high cognitive load, detail intense, and tactically non-obvious? How much of the code you write is actually like this? I work in the domain of data modeling, for me once the math is worked out majority of the code is "trivial". The kind of code you are talking about is maybe 20% of my time. Honestly, also th…

Creatively thinking about what a client needs, how the architecture for that would be like, general systems thinking, UX etc. and seeing that come to live in a clean, maintainable way, that's what lights up my eyes. The minutiae of code implementation, not so much, that's just an implementation detail, a hurdle to overcome. The current crop of tooling helps with that tremendously, and for someone like me, it's been a wonderful time, a golden era. To the people who like to handcraft every line of code to perfection, people who derive their joy from that, I think they benefit a lot less.

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#213

Post by danielbln »

benreesman wrote: post #105
TeMPOraL wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Someone already operating at the very limit of their abilities doing stuff that is for them high complexity, high cognitive load, detail intense, and tactically non-obvious? When you zoom in, even this kind of work isn't uniform - a lot of it is still shaving yaks, boring chores, and tasks that are hard dependencies for the work that is truly cognitively demanding, but themselves are easy(ish) annoyances. It's thos…

Yeah, I don't fuck with Docker jank and cloud jank and shit. I don't fuck with dynamic linking. I don't fuck with lagged-ass electron apps. I don't fuck with package managers that need a SAT solver but don't have one. That's all going to be a hard no from me dawg. When I said that after you've done all the other stuff, I was including cutting all the ridiculous bullshit that's been foisted on an entire generation of…

Ok, that's great for you. Most of us don't have the luxury of going full Richard Stallmann in their day to day and are more than happy to have some of the necessary grunt work to be automated away.

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#214

Post by Brendinooo »

freeone3000 wrote: post #46
sottol wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, I find the exact opposite. Although to a much lesser extent (maybe 50% boost). I ended shoehorned into backend dev in Ruby/Py/Java and don't find it improves my day to day a lot. Specifically in C, it can bang out complicated but mostly common data-structures without fault where I would surely do one-off errors. I guess since I do C for hobby I tend to solve more interesting and complicated problems like…

As in, it seems to be best at problems that you’re unfamiliar with in domains where you have trouble judging the quality?

>it seems to be best at problems that you’re unfamiliar with

Yes.

>in domains where you have trouble judging the quality

Sure, possibly. Kind of like how you think the news is accurate until you read a story that's in your field.

But not necessarily. Might just be more "I don't know how do to in ", and LLMs are good at doing basic tasks.

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#215

Post by Fastjur »

> To compute the actual speedup – or, rather, slowdown! – provided by AI tools, the researchers compared the developers’ predictions of how long each task would take to the measured completion time.

I'm sorry, but it feels to me like this research has only proven that developers tend to underestimate how long a task is supposed to take, with or without AI.

In no way did they actually measure how much faster a specific task was when performed with and without AI?

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#216

Post by Brendinooo »

justinko wrote: post #3
latenightcoding wrote: post #2

LLMs make me 10-20x more productive in frontend work which I barely do. But when it comes to low-level stuff (C/C++) I personally don't find it too useful. it just replaces my need to search stackoverflow. edit: should have mentioned the low-level stuff I work on is mature code and a lot of times novel.

Same. It’s amazing for frontend.

As a front-of-the-frontend guy, I think it's terrible with CSS and SVG and just okay with HTML.

I work at a shop where we do all custom frontend work and it's just not up to the task. And, while it has chipped in on some accessibility features for me, I wouldn't trust it to do that unsupervised. Even semantic HTML is a mixed bag: if you point out something is a figure/figcaption it'll probably do it right, but I haven't found that it'll intuit these things and get it right on the first try.

But I'd imagine if you don't care about the frontend looking original or even good, and you stick really closely to something like tailwind, it could output something good enough.

And critically, I think a lot of times the hardest part of frontend work is starting, getting that first iteration out. LLMs are good for that. Actually got me over the hump on a little personal page I made a month or so ago and it was a massive help. Put out something that looked terrible but gave me what I needed to move forward.

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#217

Post by boogieknite »

journal wrote: post #34
tomcam wrote: post #16

What bothers me more than any of this particular discussion is that we seem to be incapable of determining programmer productivity in a meaningful way since my debut as a programmer 40 years ago.

what about the $ you make? isn't that an indicator? you've probably made more than me, so you are more successful while both of us might be doing the same thing.

what about the $ you generate? im a software developer consultant. we charge by the hour. up front, time and materials, and/or support hours. not too many leaps of logic to see there is a downside to completing a task too quickly or too well

i have to bill my clients and have documented around 3 weeks of development time saved by using LLMs to port other client systems to our system since December. on one hand this means we should probably update our cost estimates, but im not management so for the time ive decided to use the saved time to overdeliver on quality

eventually clients might get wise and not want to overdeliver on quality and we would charge less according to time saved by LLMs. despite a measured increase in "productivity" i would be generating less $ because my overall billable hour % decreases

hopefully overdelivering now reduces tech debt to reduce overhead and introduces new features which can increase our client pipeline to offset the eventual shift in what we charge our clients. thats about all the agency i can find in this situation

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#218

Post by pron »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #90
benreesman wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find the swings to be wild, when you win with it, you win really big. But when you lose with it, it's a real bite out of your week too. And I think 10x to 20x has to be figurative right, you can do 20x by volume maybe, but to borrow an expression from Steve Ballmer, that's like measuring an airplane by kilograms. Someone already operating at the very limit of their abilities doing stuff that is for them high comple…

> Someone already operating at the very limit of their abilities doing stuff that is for them high complexity, high cognitive load, detail intense, and tactically non-obvious? When you zoom in, even this kind of work isn't uniform - a lot of it is still shaving yaks, boring chores, and tasks that are hard dependencies for the work that is truly cognitively demanding, but themselves are easy(ish) annoyances. It's thos…

> Offloading some of that to AI lets one free some mental capacity for work that actually benefits from that.

Maybe, but I don't feel (of course, I could be wrong) that doing boring tasks take away any mental capacity; they feel more like fidgeting while I think. If a tool could do the boring things it may free my time to do other boring work that allows me to think - like doing the dishes - provided I don't have to carefully review the code.

Another issue (that I asked about yesterday [1]) is that seemingly boring tasks may end up being more subtle once you start coding them, and while I don't care too much about the quality of the code in the early iterations of the project, I have to be able to trust that whatever does the coding for me will come back and report any difficulties I hadn't anticipated.

> Reviewing such code is, thus, easier (and less demoralizing) than writing it.

That might well be true, but since writing it doesn't cost me much to begin with, the benefit might not be large. Don't get me wrong, I would still take it, but only if I could fully trust the agent to tell me what subtleties it encountered.

> there's too much unavoidable but trivial bullshit involved in software these days (build scripts, Dockerfies, IaaS). Preventing deep context switching on those is a big time saver.

If work is truly trivial, I'd like it to be automated by something that I can trust to do trivial work well and/or tell me when things aren't as trivial and I should pay attention to some detail I overlooked.

We can generally trust machines to either work reliably or fail with some clear indication. People might not be fully reliable, but we can generally trust them to report back with important questions they have or information they've learnt while doing the job. From the reports I've seen about using coding agents, they work like neither. You can neither trust them to succeed or fail reliably, nor can you trust them to come back with pertinent questions or information. Without either kind of trust, I don't think that "offloading" work to them would truly feel like offloading. I'm sure some people can work with that, but I think I'll wait until I can trust the agents.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44526048

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#219

Post by Falimonda »

hluska wrote: post #18
Falimonda wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's moreso that a backend developer can now throw together a frontend and vice-versa without relying on a team member or needing to set aside time to internalize all the necessary concepts to just make that other part of the system work. I imagine even a full-stack developer will find benefits.

This has nothing to do with what they asked.

Copilot is going to feel "amazing" at helping you quickly work within just about any subject that you're not already an expert in.

Whether or not a general purpose foundation model for coding is trained on more backend or frontend code is largely irrelevant in this specific context.

Re: AI coding tools can reduce productivity

#220

Post by UncleMeat »

AllegedAlec wrote: post #142
jaredklewis wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m confused as to why anyone would think this would be possible to determine. Like can we determine the productivity of doctors, lawyers, journalists, or pastry chefs? What job out there is so simple that we can meaningfully measure all the positive and negative effects of the worker as well as account for different conditions between workers. I could probably get behind the idea that you could measure productivity…

> Like can we determine the productivity of doctors, lawyers, journalists, or pastry chefs? Yes, yes we can. Programmers really need to stop this cope about us being such special snowflakes that we can't be assessed and that our maangers just need to take that we're worth keeping around on good faith.

"Software engineers can be qualitatively assessed for the purposes of pay and promotion" and "software engineers can have their productivity measured and quantified" are two very different things.
Post reply on HN