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Appearing productive in the workplace

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Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#561

Post by shermantanktop »

lqet wrote: post #501

> The first is when novices in a field are able to produce work that resembles what their seniors produce [...]. > The second is when people generate artifacts in disciplines they were never trained in. There is a third shape. Experts who have become so reliant / accustomed to AI that it dilutes their previously sharp judgment and, importantly, taste . I am seeing more and more work produced by experts which seems st…

I’m watching out for that in my own work. I’m a pragmatic person but I have sweated over details that Claude will just blast out a solution to, and the temptation to say “tests pass, move on” is strong.

It’s a little like riding a horse that knows the route.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#562

Post by __mharrison__ »

AI accelerated two groups of folks. Beginners/naive and experts.

This article only talks about beginners digging a hole for themselves.

Doesn't mention the speedup that experts get.

I'm my post 12 years as a corporate trainer, I've worked with lots of companies, teaching how to code, collaborate, and what makes code good. I've also used AI a lot and can use it to quickly write code better than 95% of software engineers. (Sample size one disclaimer)

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#563

Post by bluGill »

bigfatkitten wrote: post #356
pocksuppet wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone's job is to please their manager. Their job is shipping functional product features only if that's what their manager likes. In functional companies, that should be the case. There aren't many functional companies.

In my last company, what my manager liked was an increase in AI adoption metrics, because that’s what his boss likes.

That is the current fad, so that is what a lot of bosses like. There have been different fads in the past, there will be different ones in the future. Some of the fads have a useful core that remains today, some of them are completely gone. All of them were overhyped at the start.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#564

Post by localhoster »

shermantanktop wrote: post #561
lqet wrote: post #501

> The first is when novices in a field are able to produce work that resembles what their seniors produce [...]. > The second is when people generate artifacts in disciplines they were never trained in. There is a third shape. Experts who have become so reliant / accustomed to AI that it dilutes their previously sharp judgment and, importantly, taste . I am seeing more and more work produced by experts which seems st…

I’m watching out for that in my own work. I’m a pragmatic person but I have sweated over details that Claude will just blast out a solution to, and the temptation to say “tests pass, move on” is strong. It’s a little like riding a horse that knows the route.

Almost accurate It's not "the route" But "a route"

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#565

Post by angled »

TrackerFF wrote: post #414

I watched a video of some (unemployed) programmer lamenting over the current job situation market. He had been coding for a good while, but had recently been laid off. The vid was mainly concerning the searching and interview process, but it also did highlight something I find somewhat true and important: Right now we're in a gold rush. Companies, that be established ones or startups, are in a frenzy to transform or…

I am somewhat relieved to be working in a regulated industry where deterministic outputs are still needed. Maybe when someone has a validated AI model there will be trouble ...

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#567

Post by igregoryca »

Merad wrote: post #186
danaw wrote: post #129

i have a strong suspicion that the most productive software teams that leverage llms to build quality software will use it for the following: - intelligent autocomplete: the "OG" llm use for most developers where the generated code is just an extension of your active thought process. where you maintain the context of the code being worked on, rather than outsourcing your thinking to the llm - brainstorming: llms can…

> intelligent autocomplete I'm curious how much value others are finding in this. Personally I turned it off about a year ago and went back to traditional (jetbrains) IDE autocomplete. In my experience the AI suggestions would predict exactly what I wanted < 1% of the time, were useful perhaps 10% of the time, and otherwise were simply wrong and annoying. Standard IDE features allowing me to quickly search and/or bro…

Can't speak for intelligent autocomplete writ large, but I treat it as an ergonomic feature, and Cursor's implementation is pretty good (though I'm not sure it's improved all that much in the past year).

It constantly takes whatever is currently visible in your editor to feed its context. If you get a nonsense/hallucinated suggestion, you can accept it, get it to read the error message from LSP diagnostics, undo, and then it'll correct itself next time. Or if you need to make changes in 5 places, and the next 4 changes are easy to guess after seeing the first one, it'll guess the next 4 for you.

I still use standard IDE features extensively. The intelligent autocomplete is just another tool to reduce typing when the next change is easy to guess.

Oh, and I turn it off when I'm writing prose or need to actually think deeply. Then it really does hurt more then help.

(Worth noting: I currently work primarily in Go, which is a language that's ridiculously verbose and has lots of repetitive patterns. YMMV for more expressive languages.)

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#568

Post by svnt »

mikeshi42 wrote: post #364

While I agree with some of these observations - the research cited in the article really do not match the claims at all from what I can tell. > An NBER study of support agents [2] found generative AI boosted novice productivity by about a third while barely helping experts. Harvard Business School researchers found the same pattern in consulting work [3]. The first work cited was a research study on GPT-3(!) from 202…

These issues align with what I found, and make this other comment more explainable:

> Having trouble understanding the final line:

> > Also, those that claimed this article is ironically a casualty of it’s own complaint are 100% right, Kudos.

> Why would the article be a casualty of its own complaint?

The author probably sourced the article using AI; the sources don’t quite align in the way they often don’t when sourced by AI.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#569

Post by whstl »

my-next-account wrote: post #427
pelagicAustral wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come on now. Even I know exactly what he's talking about and I have worked far and beyond all the craze of the real world, having mainly dedicated time to small dev shops in the past 2 decades.

No man, it's because of their poor ability to pick jobs, not because the other commenter was in a different niche or whatever than they are. It's absolutely not possible for 2 people to have a different experience, as there are at most 5 programmers in the entire world.

I literally can't picture someone who simultaneously 1) has been managing to land great jobs in small shops, 2) browses HN and 3) doesn't empathize with complaints of bloat, dependencies, pager duty and meetings.

Re: Appearing productive in the workplace

#570

Post by 0rbiter »

jeremyjh wrote: post #243
beachy wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My friend built a construction management SaaS entirely via Claude. It looked damned impressive, and it kind of worked to demo, but he is in no way a programmer, though he understood the problem domain very well. I asked a few basic questions: - where is the data stored? - How would you recover from a database failure? - does it consume tokens at runtime? - what is the runtime used at the back end? - why are the web…

One of the riskier bets my team is currently making is that this is exactly what is needed, and nearly nothing more. We have LOB prototypes vibe coded by enthusiastic domain experts that we are supporting in a “port and release” fashion. A senior engineer takes the prototype and uses Claude code to generate a reasonable design, do an initial rough port (~80% functional, 100% auth & audit logging) and (hopefully) all…

> review bots

Say no more.

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