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

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

#61

Post by consumer451 »

chilipepperhott wrote: post #58
consumer451 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will not be providing proof here, but I went from someone who last wrote production code >15 years ago, to last week, a Fortune 50 demo client saying "this is far better than our internal tool." I am a solo builder. I feel like I am an outlier, but I do exist.

Did you make money from it?

I am thrilled to report that after 1.5yrs of rice and beans: yes!

The first client has paid, and signed a 3 year contract. Not huge money, but 5 figures per year. That client didn't even see what the F50 demo user saw.

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

#62

Post by graydsl »

outside2344 wrote: post #47
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?

And guess what humans even learn, get better and might bring more value in the future.

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

#63

Post by insane_dreamer »

chapel wrote: post #6

Read the first paragraph could tell it was AI written. Maybe if it was hand edited to be less AI I would have read more but it looked like the laziest Claude prose. That'll be a no from me dawg.

I think we have to accept that most/all prose in the future will either be AI written or AI edited at least.

Fine so long as the content checks out (!important). I'm not reading it for its artistic or human value.

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

#65

Post by Gagarin1917 »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #27
Gagarin1917 wrote: post #23

>And in coding specifically, the speedup is real and comes with its own bill. Oh so this article isn’t really about where AI spending is actually happening. I HOPE people aren’t spending money on AI writing emails. That’s definitely not worth it. Companies are spending the most on coding tools, not email writing. That’s the main value proposition right now. It also doesn’t get into media generation and industries tha…

I use AI to shorten my emails, I write as I talk, and I ramble a lot in my head.

But surely the free version of any of the chatbots is enough to achieve that, right? You don’t need a Pro subscription for that.

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

#66

Post by SoftTalker »

skjfjnflw wrote: post #54
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…

Who is "making apps" at work? I keep seeing AI enthusiasts talk about how many apps they are making. I've never seen a real life dev whose job is churning out apps.

I think for some people "apps" just means any software.

I used to work with a guy who at some point had heard the term "macro" in regards to Word or Excel and at that point anything to do with computers was a "macro."

We'd get calls from him at the help desk saying "my mouse macros are not working" meaning i.e. that his mouse wasn't working, in that era because the roller ball was dirty.

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

#67

Post by chilipepperhott »

dionian wrote: post #30

> But in the wild the gains shrink to about 3% of your hours not my experience at all

In research that studies a large enough population there will always be outliers. Maybe you are one of them. Your counterexample does not prove them wrong.

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

#68

Post by Gagarin1917 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #36
Gagarin1917 wrote: post #23

>And in coding specifically, the speedup is real and comes with its own bill. Oh so this article isn’t really about where AI spending is actually happening. I HOPE people aren’t spending money on AI writing emails. That’s definitely not worth it. Companies are spending the most on coding tools, not email writing. That’s the main value proposition right now. It also doesn’t get into media generation and industries tha…

This comment is odd given that it's high on opinion without ever refuting the actual data given in the article. Like it or not, many business people spend hours a day writing emails. The article pointed out specific data showing AI could reduce these hours spent while raising quality. I'll take the article's actual data and research over your data-free spouts of "That's definitely not worth it" and "Useless".

I’m not saying “It’s crazy to ever write emails with AI.”

I’m saying it shouldn’t hardly cost any money, emails are not token intensive and most people could likely use the free version of chatbots just fine.

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

#69

Post by kevin42 »

bayarearefugee wrote: post #37
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 article is probably not accurate. AI allows me to create hugely complex apps. To prove the article wrong even within the context of AI coding (which wasnt the focus of the article) you would have to present proof that creating these new AI apps resulted in you making lots of new money.

You'll have to take my word for it because I'm not going to disclose my private business or personal financial records.

But, I'm running a small, two person business and we are being paid by a large company to develop a robotics project. We're working at a very fast velocity and have fielded a prototype within a few months. I've been doing this kind of work for years, and we're more productive than larger teams (8-10 developers) I've employed before. Five years ago, I would have needed at least 4 senior engineers to do the work we're doing now, and we're moving faster than we could even then.

And I'm being compensated at a flat rate by a major company so we're making really good money. The customer is happy with the results. Claude easily writes 90% of the code we use.

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

#70

Post by ermantrout »

kstenerud wrote: post #9

Calling bullshit on this. The size of projects I've done in the past year compared to before is mind boggling. There is NO way I could have reached this level of productivity without a properly trained and properly prompted LLM.

[flagged]
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