Preliminary data from a longitudinal AI impact study • Hacker News Board

Re: Preliminary data from a longitudinal AI impact study

#31

Post by skyberrys » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 4:28 AM UTC

jongjong wrote: post #18

As I've said before, AI is a force multiplier. A 10x developer is now a 100x developer and a -10x developer (complexity maker/value destroyer) is now a -100x developer. I can understand why a lot of companies are cutting junior roles. What AI does is it automates most of the stuff that juniors are good at (coding fast) but not much of the stuff that the seniors are good at. That said, I've worked with some juniors wh…

Do the juniors now develop more reliably into 100x seniors or is it more of a fluctuating line?

Re: Preliminary data from a longitudinal AI impact study

#32

Post by slopinthebag » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 4:35 AM UTC

I think it's possible we could get to something like %30. I imagine that AI is being overused by a lot of devs in places where it has a marginal or even negative impact of productivity. It's easy to remember your "WOW!" moments when it does something quickly and flawlessly, but I think we tend to forget the times when it struggles or when you outright have to throw it away and start over.

So even just learning how to use it better (or less side-eying the AI boosters) will lead to improvements. I'm not sure how much of a difference incremental improvements on the models or harnesses will make.

Of course this is also skewed by what type of work you do - textbook stuff that's well inside the distribution will have more tasks that can be accomplished with AI tools than stuff that is less well represented in the training data. It's not a mystery why the majority of my AI usage is with HTML and CSS.

Re: Preliminary data from a longitudinal AI impact study

#33

Post by tcskeptic » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 4:40 AM UTC

The idea that any results of AI productivity enhancements that include data from 2024 are valid is bananas.

I’m not even a programmer — but the step change since late fall 2025 is incredible.

I have a young relative that manages in house product for a financial services company. Programming team of 150 ish. That will be 15 ish by June and they are iterating much more quickly now.

So much cope in this thread. AI is in fact the grim reaper for the median coder. The emerging middle class in India tech hubs is about to get vaporized

Re: Preliminary data from a longitudinal AI impact study

#34

Post by slopinthebag » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 4:44 AM UTC

tcskeptic wrote: post #33

The idea that any results of AI productivity enhancements that include data from 2024 are valid is bananas. I’m not even a programmer — but the step change since late fall 2025 is incredible. I have a young relative that manages in house product for a financial services company. Programming team of 150 ish. That will be 15 ish by June and they are iterating much more quickly now. So much cope in this thread. AI is in…

> AI is in fact the grim reaper for the median coder.

Is it? You don't think the median coder can use these AI tools? In my experience they're incredibly simple to use.

Re: Preliminary data from a longitudinal AI impact study

#35

Post by neomantra » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 11:53 AM UTC

nubg wrote: post #21

jackschultz wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very much agree. Gave a presentation on AI to a group earlier this week and I spent a third of the time talking about the Opus 4.5 inflection point in AI history. First time using that model the day it was released it was so clear that it knew what it was doing at a different level. People still jump around to different models or tools or time frames when talking about AI and usefulness, but those have no meaning if…

Would you mind sharing the presentation? Or an AI summary of it.

I gave a similar presentation in January which covers the AI features that emerged in 2025 that culminated in the step-function in capability in Nov'25 and where I went from there.... (certainly my GitHub activity is bright green since)

The presentation was created with Claude Code to prove itself; never going back to Keynote/PowerPoint. Press 'X' key to disable "safe mode". Prompts are in the repo.

https://neomantra.github.io/presentations/GolangMeetupJan202...

Re: Preliminary data from a longitudinal AI impact study

#36

Post by NewLogic » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 1:37 PM UTC

nemo44x wrote: post #25

At the very least teams will communicate with each other much better. So much of the tedium of office work is able to be automated so people can spend more time solving problems instead. But the communication will massively improve. More artifacts being generated of progress and needs and AI can link related things around an organization rapidly and accurately. Workflows will massively improve. A living graph of an e…

I'm not seeing that at all. I'm seeing more markdown text being produced by AI but nobody wants to read it because the signal to noise is low. AI doesn't yet have a context window wide enough to have the judgement capability to filter the gold from the fluff for a moderate sized org.

Re: Preliminary data from a longitudinal AI impact study

#37

Post by verdverm » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 1:59 PM UTC

eucyclos wrote: post #10

verdverm wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last one that made the rounds was negative, so we have moved more than 10% in less than 1/2 a year

That's got to be more about processes around it than the tool itself though, right?

The models released at the end of last year were notable because they finally became reliably useful, relatively. It's the same model generation that enables OpenClaw to work well, take off, and lead to the new HN rule

Re: Preliminary data from a longitudinal AI impact study

#38

Post by nemo44x » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 2:07 PM UTC

NewLogic wrote: post #36

nemo44x wrote: post #25

At the very least teams will communicate with each other much better. So much of the tedium of office work is able to be automated so people can spend more time solving problems instead. But the communication will massively improve. More artifacts being generated of progress and needs and AI can link related things around an organization rapidly and accurately. Workflows will massively improve. A living graph of an e…

I'm not seeing that at all. I'm seeing more markdown text being produced by AI but nobody wants to read it because the signal to noise is low. AI doesn't yet have a context window wide enough to have the judgement capability to filter the gold from the fluff for a moderate sized org.

Yeah I don’t think yet. But keep generating and tooling will arrive that can better connect it. We have the nodes (markdown files) but not the edges of the graph.

Re: Preliminary data from a longitudinal AI impact study

#39

Post by AndrewKemendo » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 2:16 PM UTC

Swizec wrote: post #23

0xbadc0de5 wrote: post #6

Fair assessment. And worth noting that in a sane world, a broad 10% productivity improvement across industry would be a once-in-a-lifetime, headline-making story, not a disappointment.

> And worth noting that in a sane world, a broad 10% productivity improvement across industry would be a once-in-a-lifetime, headline-making story, not a disappointment The biggest risk in software development is building the wrong thing. Digging yourself into a hole 10% faster is _worse_. You now have more backtracking to do!

Or….now you have 10% more time to spend on validating and testing the problem set and doing product rollout experiments more frequently

Re: Preliminary data from a longitudinal AI impact study

#40

Post by jygg4 » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 3:18 PM UTC

jongjong wrote: post #18

As I've said before, AI is a force multiplier. A 10x developer is now a 100x developer and a -10x developer (complexity maker/value destroyer) is now a -100x developer. I can understand why a lot of companies are cutting junior roles. What AI does is it automates most of the stuff that juniors are good at (coding fast) but not much of the stuff that the seniors are good at. That said, I've worked with some juniors wh…

Kissing your ass comments aside… first of all - define a 10x developer.

We’ve all seen this phrase thrown around and it’s useless. Define the characteristics of one.

I’d argue the hiring of juniors is dropping because why should a firm ‘invest’ in someone that is likely to leave before they become of benefit for the firm? Mobility in the software engineer profession harms it. The fanfare around LLM’s enhances the argument via leverage provided to seniors.

E.g in accounting etc people tend to stick around for a long time in one firm… hence the expense is an investment. Firms invest in juniors to have future directors, partners etc. this is not a model that applies to software engineering. It may have done at one point, but not anymore.