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AI saves about 3% of your hours, and almost none of it reaches the money

okaneland.com

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Re: AI saves about 3% of your hours, and almost none of it reaches the money

#41

Post by aleqs »

hackmack10 wrote: post #20

This article is probably not accurate. AI allows me to create hugely complex apps. Apps that I mostly don't understand the underlying code but can evaluate that it works fairly quick and effectively. That said, in the corporate world, it's not that easy. There are tons of hoops to jump through and context switching all day long. So while my code is 100% AI generated these days, and I can make extremely complicated ap…

On personal projects AI has multiplied my velocity by about 10x.

In a corporate setting I've seen it reduce velocity by 80% in some cases.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48777257#48778335

Re: AI saves about 3% of your hours, and almost none of it reaches the money

#42

Post by bigstrat2003 »

peter422 wrote: post #5

A year ago AI wrote roughly 0% of my code and now it writes roughly 100%. Which is to say any AI study from a year ago is fairly out of date with the speed of advancement.

AI hasn't gotten better, you've just given in to the hype.

Re: AI saves about 3% of your hours, and almost none of it reaches the money

#43

Post by cuttothechase »

3% of measurable gains is massive in itself isn't it? Taken as a percentage of the total volume of workforce and the world economy?

If we can gain 3% across the board gains on AI based tasks without subsidized expenses, that would be a great win!?

Re: AI saves about 3% of your hours, and almost none of it reaches the money

#44

Post by softwaredoug »

hackmack10 wrote: post #20

This article is probably not accurate. AI allows me to create hugely complex apps. Apps that I mostly don't understand the underlying code but can evaluate that it works fairly quick and effectively. That said, in the corporate world, it's not that easy. There are tons of hoops to jump through and context switching all day long. So while my code is 100% AI generated these days, and I can make extremely complicated ap…

This has always caught up to me in a bad way.

All it takes is some brittleness to need to take apart the app code and understand it. AI fixes one thing, breaks something completely unrelated.

And usually it’s full of lots of spaghetti code slop. Then I need to find ways to modularize it, make it testable, and at least at some level clean it up.

This is why I say AI sw eng is basically just working with legacy code. It has always turned into unraveling and refactoring the ball of mud to be sane for me and agents to continue working with.

More and more though I just go slower. Write much of the code myself. And setup good validation for the specific parts I trust an agent to work autonomously. I try to expand the surface of things that can be done well autonomously without losing my own grip on the code.

Re: AI saves about 3% of your hours, and almost none of it reaches the money

#45

Post by pianopatrick »

eslaught wrote: post #10
_pdp_ wrote: post #3

Saving time does not automatically translate into higher productivity, or even lower costs. That should be obvious? In fact, I would argue the that with AI, companies should expect to spend more on average, without necessarily seeing any meaningful cost savings nor increase in profits. That does not mean they can escape this though. It is just like paying for ads, backlinks etc.

In what sense is AI like paying for ads? In one case you legitimately lose to the competition if you stop (prisoner's dilemma). In other case, whether and how much you lose depends almost entirely on how much it actually impacts your productivity in practice (or not). If you're referring to the public perception benefits (supposing those even exist, which isn't clear to me), then it seems easy to make a lot of noise…

If we assume everyone has access to the same AI tools and those tools do help improve output a lot then you get the same prisoner's dilemma as ads.

The people using the AI tools to improve their output will set higher consumer expectations for their product or service. If you do not also use AI, you will not be able to keep up, and so you will lose business over time.

So you have to pay for AI just to keep up with the other people who pay for AI.

But then if everyone is paying for and using AI to improve their product or service, no one can steal market share from each other. So you are all now paying a lot and AI is doing a lot and the buyers are getting better results, but that does not necessarily lead to better financial results in terms of market share, revenue, costs or profits for the business that is now using AI

Re: AI saves about 3% of your hours, and almost none of it reaches the money

#46

Post by SoftTalker »

steve1977 wrote: post #17
peter422 wrote: post #5

A year ago AI wrote roughly 0% of my code and now it writes roughly 100%. Which is to say any AI study from a year ago is fairly out of date with the speed of advancement.

But that itself doesn't tell us yet how much time it saved you at the end of the day.

As a developer, on my very best days I probably spent no more than 50% of my day actually writing code. So call it 4 hours of actual hands-on-keyboard coding.

But AI can write code much faster than a human. In 4 hours it might be able to write what would have taken me a week. Or more. Assuming it had proper specifications for that volume of code.

Re: AI saves about 3% of your hours, and almost none of it reaches the money

#47

Post by outside2344 »

cuttothechase wrote: post #43

3% of measurable gains is massive in itself isn't it? Taken as a percentage of the total volume of workforce and the world economy? If we can gain 3% across the board gains on AI based tasks without subsidized expenses, that would be a great win!?

But is it a 3% gain if we include the costs? Or would it actually be cheaper to just hire humans with the money going to tokens?

Re: AI saves about 3% of your hours, and almost none of it reaches the money

#49

Post by cortesoft »

hackmack10 wrote: post #20

This article is probably not accurate. AI allows me to create hugely complex apps. Apps that I mostly don't understand the underlying code but can evaluate that it works fairly quick and effectively. That said, in the corporate world, it's not that easy. There are tons of hoops to jump through and context switching all day long. So while my code is 100% AI generated these days, and I can make extremely complicated ap…

The article could be accurate but misleading.

It focuses on the average (mean), but does not talk about the distribution at all. It groups ALL uses of AI together, which isn't very helpful in determining if it is worth it or not to use AI for a specific purpose.

For example, these stats could mean every single use gets 3% time savings, or some uses get 80% time savings and other use cases actually take more time.

Re: AI saves about 3% of your hours, and almost none of it reaches the money

#50

Post by bayarearefugee »

peter422 wrote: post #5

A year ago AI wrote roughly 0% of my code and now it writes roughly 100%. Which is to say any AI study from a year ago is fairly out of date with the speed of advancement.

> A year ago AI wrote roughly 0% of my code and now it writes roughly 100%.

Did the amount of money you or your employer make rise by anywhere near 100% as well?

Because that is really the primary question behind articles like this focusing on the economic benefits.

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