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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

#621

Post by zubiaur »

rybosworld wrote: post #612

Companies over a certain size (say more than 25+ employees), are universally bad at: - measuring productivity - adapting to change This article just reinforces that. Past a certain headcount, executives have little to no understanding of what IC day-to-day is like. AI tooling doesn't fix the bureaucracy the c-suite helped to create.

And there are incentives to miss-report.

My team has gained a reputation of being some sort of firefighting crew.

We are being called by PMs when projects are failing, usually engineering-data and engineering-adjacent stuff. (Mechanical/Electrical).

We automate the heck out the processes, using a mix of AI processing, RAGs, and AI assisted coding.

We rescue the projects. Finish ahead of schedule. Make fewer mistakes. We gain additional scope. We win new projects. We bring new clients.

But when higher ups ask the people we helped about productivity gains, the most generous will say stuff like "it takes as long to review as it takes to do things manually", "They really helped on {inconsequential part of the deliverable}"

If the that is the takeaway these people were taking, they would incredibly misled. Luckily for me, I have people who deal with the politics, while my team can focus on delivery.

Our reputation keeps growing, and we keep delivering faster. The heads of the departments we work with love us, the middle rank who were doing the laborious crap, maybe not so much.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#622

Post by bitgeist »

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…

I like your username.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#624

Post by graybeardhacker »

rkomorn wrote: post #456
Wilder7977 wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And those companies will do what? Produce products in uber-saturated markets? Or magically 9900 more products or markets will be created, all of them successful?

I don't understand the people who think more companies with fewer employees is a good thing. I already feel spammed to death by desperate requests for my consumption as is.

Because: 1. One person companies are better at giving the wealth to the worker. 2. With thousands of companies the products can be more targeted and each product can serve fewer people and still be profitable

Then companies won't need to spam you to convince you that you need something you don't. Or that their product will help you in ways it can't.

Once person companies will not have a 100 person marketing team trying to inject ads into ever corner of your life.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#625

Post by yubblegum »

I've sat in a room with a too big to tail banker's VP happily telling me and my boss that "we're getting rid of this whole floor".

Dateline ~2010. Location: NYC Why:Indian outsourced shops.

Now the zinger, dear hn, is this: He actually said to us (we ran a more boutique consulting firm) that "everything has to be done 3 times" and "their work is crap". But "we're getting rid of this floor".

That, imho, was due to geopolitical machinations of inducing India to become part of the West. The immediate equation of "money for quality work" wasn't working but the 'our higher ups' had more grand plans and sacrificing and gutting the IT industry in US was not a problem.

So, given the incentives these days, do not remotely pin your hopes on what these CEOs are saying. It means nothing whatsoever.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#626

Post by flurdy »

flurdy wrote: post #550
lonelyasacloud wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... and yet project velocity does not go much faster 1) The models like us have finite context windows and intelligence, even with good engineering practices system complexity will eventually slow them down. 2) At the moment at least, the code still needs to be reviewed and signed off by us and reading someone else's code is usually harder than writing it.

Are people still reading PRs in detail manually? I am after the automated PR agents have all passed a PR I tend to let Claude Code and Codex give me a summary, with an MCP skill to read the requirement story. I trust their ability to catch edge cases and typos more than me. I just check the general structure of the PR

I may use my own skill to automate this... https://github.com/flurdy/agent-skills/blob/main/skills/revi...

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#627

Post by fastasucan »

XenophileJKO wrote: post #397
overgard wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think "results don't match promises" is the same as "not knowing how to use it". I've been using Claude and OpenAI's latest models for the past two weeks now (probably moving at about 1000 lines of code a day, which is what I can comfortably review), and it makes subtle hard-to-find mistakes all over the place. Or it just misunderstands well known design patterns, or does something bone headed. I'm fine with…

If you know good architecture and you are testing as you go, I would say, it is probably pretty damn close to being able to build a company without looking at the code. Not without "risk" but definitely doable and plausible. My current project that I started this weekend is a rust client server game with the client compiled into web assembly. I do these projects without reading the code at all as a way to gauge what…

Why is there a point of not reading the code? Even with very competent humans we have put in place systems for reviewing the code.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#628

Post by Retric »

lelanthran wrote: post #500
Retric wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jobs you don’t notice or understand often look pointless. HR on the surface seems unimportant, but you’d notice if the company stopped having health insurance or sending your taxes to the IRS etc etc. In the end when jobs are done right they seem to disappear. We notice crappy software or a poorly done HVAC system not clean carpets.

> HR on the surface seems unimportant, but you’d notice if the company stopped having health insurance or sending your taxes to the IRS etc etc. That's not why companies have HR; sure, it's a nice side-effect , but it's not the reason for HR. HR exists primarily to protect the company from the employees.

Side effect seems like an odd way to describe what’s going on when these functions are required for a company to operate.

Companies don’t survive if nobody is paid to show up every day or if they keep paying every single ex employee that ever worked for the company. It’s harder to attract new employees if you don’t offer competitive salaries or benefits. HR is a tiny part of most companies, but without that work being done the company would absolutely fail.

Similarly a specific ratio of flight attendants to passengers are required by the FAA in case of an emergency. Airlines use them for other stuff but they wouldn’t have nearly as many if the job was just passing out food.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#629

Post by naasking »

t43562 wrote: post #567
naasking wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> since the AI is writing the tests it's obvious that they're going to pass That's not obvious at all if the AI writing the tests is different than the AI writing the code being tested. Put into an adversarial and critical mode, the same model outputs very different results.

IMO the reason neither of them can really write entirely trustworthy tests is that they don't have domain knowledge so they write the test based on what the code does plus what they extract from some prompts rather than based on some abstract understanding of what it should do given that it's being used e.g. in a nuclear power station or for promoting cat videos or in a hospital or whatever. Obviously this is only pa…

Yes, some kind of spec is always needed, and if the human programmer only has the spec in their head, then that's going to be a problem, but it's a problem for teams of humans as well.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#630

Post by fastasucan »

docmars wrote: post #587
LunaSea wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Security auditor and criminals have a bright future ahead of them.

True, but you'd be surprised how much you can tighten up a codebase by asking a heftier model to do a security review and suggest fixes.

At what point do people really know if it has been tightened up if they never look at the code?
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