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Codegen is not productivity

antifound.com

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Re: Codegen is not productivity

#91

Post by LtWorf »

orphea wrote: post #10
nyrulez wrote: post #2

Bold claims that writing code was never the bottleneck. It may not be the only bottleneck but we conveniently move goal posts now that there is a more convenient mechanism and our profession is under threat.

our profession is under threat. It is. But I don't think it's AI that threatens it. It's susceptible to hype people who, unfortunately, have the power over people's jobs. C-level management who don't know anything better than parroting what others in the industry are saying. How is that "all engineers will be replaced in 6 months" going?

Don't forget the threat from incompetent developers who have been working by copy pasting things from stackoverflow without understanding what they are doing since several years.

Re: Codegen is not productivity

#92

Post by JanneVee »

esafak wrote: post #14
JanneVee wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read that as you have never been debugging a production issue at 3am while losing data and/or revenue.

I don't. I did those things before AI so what's new?

A feature wasn't 10000 loc written by a AI before that no one except the AI with the context understands. If you review all that to understand it fully your productivity gain diminishes, the gain might not go away fully but it is much less when you can be woken up at 3am because of an incident and start reviewing everything.

Re: Codegen is not productivity

#93

Post by antonvs »

zer00eyz wrote: post #36

I went to look at some of the authors other posts and found this: https://www.antifound.com/posts/advent-of-code-2022/ So much of our industry has spent the last two decades honing itself into a temple built around the idea of "leet code". From the interview to things like advent of code. Solving brain teasers, knowing your algorithms cold in an interview was always a terrible idea. And the sort of engineers it invit…

My career predates the leetcode phenomenon, and I always found it mystifying. My hot take is that it’s what happens when you’re hiring what are essentially human compilers: they can spit out boilerplate solutions at high speed, and that’s what leetcode is testing for.

For someone like that, LLMs are much closer to literally replacing what they do, which seems to explain a lot of the complaints. They’re also not used to working at a higher level, so effective LLM use doesn’t come naturally to them.

Re: Codegen is not productivity

#94

Post by esafak »

JanneVee wrote: post #92
esafak wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't. I did those things before AI so what's new?

A feature wasn't 10000 loc written by a AI before that no one except the AI with the context understands. If you review all that to understand it fully your productivity gain diminishes, the gain might not go away fully but it is much less when you can be woken up at 3am because of an incident and start reviewing everything.

If I'm the responder it makes no difference to me if an AI wrote it or another worker; it's alien either way.

Re: Codegen is not productivity

#95

Post by JanneVee »

esafak wrote: post #94
JanneVee wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A feature wasn't 10000 loc written by a AI before that no one except the AI with the context understands. If you review all that to understand it fully your productivity gain diminishes, the gain might not go away fully but it is much less when you can be woken up at 3am because of an incident and start reviewing everything.

If I'm the responder it makes no difference to me if an AI wrote it or another worker; it's alien either way.

Well, for me it makes a difference. I often get in a sense a "theory of mind" of the other developers when I read other code. I don't get the same thing with AI code.

Re: Codegen is not productivity

#97

Post by nubg »

sarchertech wrote: post #83
nubg wrote: post #38

rules of thumb for when to take blog posts about AI coding seriously: - must be using the latest state of the art model from the big US labs - must be on a three digit USD per month plan - must be using the latest version of a full major harness like codex, opencode, pi - agent must have access to linting, compilation tools and IDE feedback - user must instruct agent to use test driven development and write tests for…

> All my comments are written by AI. Quite meta, isn't it, knowing you came here after I triggered you with my "guys, this is AI generated slop" comment? Maybe knock it off since the rules changed to not allow AI comments.

It's irony ofc

Re: Codegen is not productivity

#98

Post by gaigalas »

greggyb wrote: post #56
gaigalas wrote: post #12

In practical terms, "productivity" is any metric that people with power can manipulate (cheating numbers, changing narratives, etc) to affect behavior of others to their interests. ALL OF IT is meaningless. It's a pointless discussion.

I'd recommend you read the book referenced in the conclusion: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4842-4221-6_... The full PDF is available for download. It's mostly a series of essays, so you can pick and choose and read nonlinearly. It's worth thinking about beyond nihilistic takes.

I'll look into it, thanks!

It might sound nihilistic (what does that even mean in this context? anyway), but it's not.

There are lot of good discussions about what good work actually means. I'm dismissing productivity discussions, not the whole set of belief systems.

Re: Codegen is not productivity

#99

Post by sarchertech »

nubg wrote: post #97
sarchertech wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All my comments are written by AI. Quite meta, isn't it, knowing you came here after I triggered you with my "guys, this is AI generated slop" comment? Maybe knock it off since the rules changed to not allow AI comments.

It's irony ofc

That’s not what irony means.

Re: Codegen is not productivity

#100

Post by sarchertech »

greggyb wrote: post #72
demorro wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I over-diagnosed your stance, apologies. I wonder if you have a take on measuring productivity in light of the potential difficulty of achieving good outcomes across the general population? You mention in the second appendix (which I skipped on my first read), that you are a rather experienced LLM user, with experiences in all the harnesses and context management which are touted as "best practice" nowadays.…

Measuring productivity in software development is a hard problem, beyond the typical categorizations used in computer science. Unfortunately, I think my best answer is to go read the book I linked in the conclusion: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4842-4221-6_... That is an unsatisfying answer. I can point to anecdotes that suggest AI is hurting productivity or improving it, but those don't make an ar…

That’s my entire issue with AI. How quickly people are pushing adoption without the evidence to back that up. My buddy works for block and he said they fired 70% of their engineers in a bid to force the remaining 30% to use AI in order to keep up.

My very large tech company has made it a goal for each engineer to spend their salary in tokens.

You can make a big bet on AI without risking the entire company. How about we wait for some evidence that shows measurable productivity increases before betting the farm.

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