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AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

fortune.com

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Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#501

Post by dangus »

KellyCriterion wrote: post #241
dangus wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And really the problem isn’t that it can’t make working code, the problem is that it’ll never get the kind of context that is in your brain. I started working today on a project I hadn’t touched in a while but I now needed to as it was involved in an incident where I needed to address some shortcomings. I knew the fix I needed to do but I went about my usual AI assisted workflow because of course I’m lazy the last th…

>>The AI doesn’t know anything about the full scope of all the things in my head about my company’s environment and the information I need to convey to it. This is your problem: How should it know if you do not provide it? Use Claude - in the pro version you can submit files for each project which are setting the context: This can be files, source code, SQL scripts, screenshots whatever - then the output will be base…

Is this process of brain dumping faster than me just writing the code?

If I was truly going to automate this one-time task I would have to give the AI access to my browser or an API token for the repository provider, so I’m either giving it dangerous modification capability via browser automation or I’m spending even more time setting up API access and trusting that it actually knows how to interact with the service via API calls.

My company doesn’t provide Claude, they give me GitHub Copilot Pro or whatever it’s called, and when I provided the website it needed to get the RPM files I was working with it didn’t actually do anything with it. It just wrote a readme file that told me what to do. Like I mention it also just eventually mistook the remote repository as my local internal repository.

And one of the specific commands it screwed up was in my existing script and was already correct, it just decided to change it for no discernible reason. I didn’t ask it to do anything related to that particular line.

With such a high error rate, I would be hesitant to actually integrate AI to other systems to try to achieve a more fully automated workflow.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#502

Post by MagicMoonlight »

torben-friis wrote: post #42
crazygringo wrote: post #21

Just to be clear, the article is NOT criticizing this. To the contrary, it's presenting it as expected , thanks to Solow's productivity paradox [1]. Which is that information technology similarly (and seemingly shockingly) didn't produce any net economic gains in the 1970's or 1980's despite all the computerization. It wasn't until the mid-to-late 1990's that information technology finally started to show clear benef…

The comparison seems flawed in terms of cost. A Claude subscription is 20 bucks per worker if using personal accounts billed to the company, which is not very far from common office tools like slack. Onboarding a worker to Claude or ChatGPT is ridiculously easy compared to teaching a 1970’s manual office worker to use an early computer. Larger implementations like automating customer service might be more costly, but…

A computer lets you save a fortune in storage rooms, admin staff, delivery fees etc. It lets you reinvent how everything runs.

ChatGPT just lets you generate slop, that may be helpful. For the vast majority of industries it doesn’t actually offer much. Your meme departments like HR might be able to push out their slop quicker, but that doesn’t improve profitability.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#503

Post by LunaSea »

simonw wrote: post #235
amrocha wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Here are a few of mine from the past month - for all of them 90%+ of the code written by Claude Code: - https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-history-json - https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-ast - https://github.com/simonw/showboat - 292 stars - https://github.com/simonw/datasette-showboat - https://github.com/simonw/rodney - 290 stars and 4 contributors who aren't me or Claude - https://github.com/simonw/chartroom Noting…

I quickly read through the `sqlite-history-json` project and it's only a few hundred lines of code and the code doesn't use transactions which means that it can fail and leave the state of the code and database in an inconsistent state.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#506

Post by kittbuilds »

abraxas wrote: post #64
torben-friis wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The comparison seems flawed in terms of cost. A Claude subscription is 20 bucks per worker if using personal accounts billed to the company, which is not very far from common office tools like slack. Onboarding a worker to Claude or ChatGPT is ridiculously easy compared to teaching a 1970’s manual office worker to use an early computer. Larger implementations like automating customer service might be more costly, but…

What if LLMs are optimizing the average office worker's productivity but the work itself simply has no discernable economic value? This is argued at length in Grebber's Bullshit Jobs essay and book.

[dead]

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#507

Post by lelanthran »

aurareturn wrote: post #249
itake wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, I agree. When Engineering Budget Managers see their AI bills rising, they will fire the bottom 5-10% every 6-12 months and increase the AI assistant budget for the high performers, giving them even more leverage.

In my case, over the last 3 years, every dev who left was not replaced. We are doing more than ever. Our team shrunk by 50% but we are serving 200% more customers. Every time a dev left, we thought we're screwed. We just leveraged AI more and more. We are also serving our customers better too with higher retention rates. When we onboard a customer with custom demands, we used to have meetings about the ROI. Now we ju…

> Today, I maintain a few repos critical to the business without even knowing the programming language they are written in. [...] No, a normal person without a background in software engineering can't do this.

Of course they can - if you don't know any of the tech-stack details (i.e. a "normal" user), why can't someone else who also doesn't know the tech-stackc details replace you?

What magic sauce do you possess other than tech-stack chops?

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#508

Post by nananana9 »

weatherlite wrote: post #451
fdefitte wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[dead]

> This is an underrated take. If you make someone 3x faster at producing a report nobody reads, you've improved nothing In the private market are there really so many companies delivering reports no one reads ? Why would management keep at it then ? The goal is to maximize profits. Now sure there are pockets of inefficiency even in the private sector but surely not that much - whatever the companies are doing - someo…

I don't know what to tell you aside from "just go and work at a large private company and see".

I'm not smart enough to understand the macro-economics or incentive structures that lead to this happening, but I've seen many 100+ man teams that output whose output is something you could reasonably expect from a 5 man team.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#509

Post by [deleted] »

aurareturn wrote: post #249
itake wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, I agree. When Engineering Budget Managers see their AI bills rising, they will fire the bottom 5-10% every 6-12 months and increase the AI assistant budget for the high performers, giving them even more leverage.

In my case, over the last 3 years, every dev who left was not replaced. We are doing more than ever. Our team shrunk by 50% but we are serving 200% more customers. Every time a dev left, we thought we're screwed. We just leveraged AI more and more. We are also serving our customers better too with higher retention rates. When we onboard a customer with custom demands, we used to have meetings about the ROI. Now we ju…

[deleted]

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#510

Post by Dan_- »

kombookcha wrote: post #371
anon-3988 wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are forgetting that they are now going to use AI to summarize it back.

This is one of my major concerns about people trying to use these tools for 'efficiency'. The only plausible value in somebody writing a huge report and somebody else reading it is information transfer. LLM's are notoriously bad at this. The noise to signal ratio is unacceptably high, and you will be worse off reading the summary than if you skimmed the first and last pages. In fact, you will be worse off than if you…

> LLM's are notoriously bad at this. The noise to signal ratio is unacceptably high…

I keep seeing this statement in threads about AI, and maybe it’s just from you, but high SNR is a good thing.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal-to-noise_ratio

I think the rest of your post is very valid. It’s the mental equivalent of this article https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47049088

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