Live data from Hacker News

AI coding tools make developers slower but they think they're faster study finds

theregister.com

1–10 of 40 posts

Re: AI coding tools make developers slower but they think they're faster study finds

#2
With all due respect to the people who have studied this, I do not care. I'm relatively young, and yet the pain of typing has started to become unmistakeable and chipped away at my productivity, motivation, and sense of invincibility.

You could tell me AI coding makes me 50% slower. I'm taking it. I refuse to grind my wrists to dust.

Re: AI coding tools make developers slower but they think they're faster study finds

#6

Lived experience says different.

This is literally what the study says: the developers said they felt they were faster after having completed the task, when in fact they were slower.

Your "lived experience" just follows the same bias.

Re: AI coding tools make developers slower but they think they're faster study finds

#7

With all due respect to the people who have studied this, I do not care. I'm relatively young, and yet the pain of typing has started to become unmistakeable and chipped away at my productivity, motivation, and sense of invincibility. You could tell me AI coding makes me 50% slower. I'm taking it. I refuse to grind my wrists to dust.

I've had similar issues, in the end switching to a split keyboard and vertical mouse/trackball helped immensely.

Re: AI coding tools make developers slower but they think they're faster study finds

#9
post #5

I want to believe that this is true. But I don't.

There's no way its true. Unless the devs simply don't know how to use AI.

I've been using roocode for about 6 months now and I automated everything. It does in one night what would take 2-3 months by hand. There's no way its not helping good devs who can prompt ai well.

Re: AI coding tools make developers slower but they think they're faster study finds

#10
I think it's because of the tasks they did. For run of the mill custom development projects AI certainly speeds things up a great lot. But when i tried to use it for comparatively hard tasks, i found it easier to do things by myself. It was nothing too fancy, just bitwise image manipulation - a custom code for pixel format conversion combined with image resizing that had to work a lot faster than ffmpeg's, but in a narrow set of conditions - no miracles here, it's not at all smarter than ffmpeg's, just specialised. 100% hand-made code took less time to build and was just as fast to execute. Of course, it used intrinsics.
Post reply on HN