AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why
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Re: AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why
#2AI tends to slow us down because we don't really know what it's good at. Can it write a proper Nginx config? I don't know—let's try. And then we end up wasting 30 minutes on it.
Fully autonomous coding tools like v0, a0, or Aider work well as long as the context is small. But once the context grows—usually due to mistakes made in earlier steps—they just can’t keep up. There's no real benefit of "try again" loop yet.
For now, I think simple VSCode extensions are the most useful. You get focused assistance on small files or snippets you’re working on, and that’s usually all you need.
Re: AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why
#3I directionally disagree with this:
``` It's common for engineers to end up working on projects which they don't have an accurate mental model of. Projects built by people who have long since left the company for pastures new. It's equally common for developers to work in environments where little value is placed on understanding systems, but a lot of value is placed on quickly delivering changes that mostly work. In this context, I think that AI tools have more of an advantage. They can ingest the unfamiliar codebase faster than any human can, and can often generate changes that will essentially work. ```
Reason: you cannot evaluate the work accurately if you have no mental model. If there's a bug given the systems unwritten assumptions you may not catch it.
Having said that it also depends on how important it is to be writing bug free code in the given domain I guess.
I like AI particularly for green field stuff and one off scripts as it let's you go faster here. Basically you build up the mental model as you're coding with the AI.
Not sure about whether this breaks down at a certain codebase size though.
Re: AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why
#4What I thought was fascinating, and should be a warning sign to everyone here:
Before beginning the study, the average developer expected about a 20% productivity boost.
After ending the study, the average developer (potentially: you) believed they actually were 20% more productive.
In reality, they were 0% more productive at best, and 40% less productive at worst.
Think about what it would be like to be that developer; off by 60% about your own output.
If you can't even gauge your own output without being 40% off on average, 60% off at worst; be cautious about strong opinions on anything in life. Especially politically.
Edit 1: Also consider, quite terrifyingly, if said developers were in an online group, together, like... here. The one developer who said she thought it made everyone slower (the truth in this particular case), would be unanimously considered an idiot, downvoted to the full -4, even with the benefit of hindsight.
Edit 2: I suppose this goes to show, that even on Hacker News, where there are relatively high-IQ and self-aware individuals present... 95% of the crowd can still possibly be wildly delusional. Stick to your gut, regardless of the crowd, and regardless of who is in it.
Re: AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why
#5Not surprising. Use of LLM has only been helpful in initial exploration of unknown code bases or languages for me.
Using it beyond that is just more work. First parse the broken response, remove any useless junk, have it reprocess with updated query.
It’s a nice tool to have (just as search engines gave us easy access to multiple sources/forums), but its limitations are well known. Trying to use it 100% as intended is a massive waste of time and resources (energy use…)
Re: AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why
#6What I thought was fascinating, and should be a warning sign to everyone here: Before beginning the study, the average developer expected about a 20% productivity boost. After ending the study, the average developer (potentially: you) believed they actually were 20% more productive. In reality, they were 0% more productive at best, and 40% less productive at worst. Think about what it would be like to be that develop…
Given how deadlines/timelines tend to (not) work in SWE, this is not surprising.
Re: AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why
#7What I thought was fascinating, and should be a warning sign to everyone here: Before beginning the study, the average developer expected about a 20% productivity boost. After ending the study, the average developer (potentially: you) believed they actually were 20% more productive. In reality, they were 0% more productive at best, and 40% less productive at worst. Think about what it would be like to be that develop…
Given how deadlines/timelines tend to (not) work in SWE, this is not surprising.
Perhaps; but this is a developer's own output with an AI tool, compared against their own historical output when they didn't use it. Apparently, the average developer (read: quite possibly most people here) can't even hit the broadside of a barn in estimating their own productivity.
Re: AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why
#8> They are experienced open source developers, working on their own projects
I just started working on a 3-month old codebase written by someone else, in a framework and architecture I had never used before
Within a couple hours, with the help of Claude Code, I had already created a really nice system to replicate data from staging to local development. Something I had built before in other projects, and I new that manually it would take me a full day or two, especially without experience in the architecture
That immediately sped up my development even more, as now I had better data to test things locally
Then a couple hours later, I had already pushed my first PR. All code following the proper coding style and practices of the existing project and the framework. That PR, would have taken me at least a couple of days and up to 2 weeks to fully manually write out and test
So sure, AI won’t speed everyone or everything up. But at least in this one case, it gave me a huge boost
As I keep going, I expect things to slow down a bit, as the complexity of the project grows. However, it’s also given me the chance to get an amazing jumpstart
Re: AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given how deadlines/timelines tend to (not) work in SWE, this is not surprising.
Perhaps; but this is a developer's own output with an AI tool, compared against their own historical output when they didn't use it. Apparently, the average developer (read: quite possibly most people here) can't even hit the broadside of a barn in estimating their own productivity.
That doesn't surprise me at all. Isn't software engineering in essence about being constantly confronted with new problems to solve and having to come up with a sufficient one on the fly? It seems very hard to estimate this, even if you know yourself well.
Re: AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why
#10One mediocre paper/study (it should not even be called that with all the bias and sample size issues) and now we have to put up with stories re-hashing and dissecting it. I really hope these don't get upvoted more in the future.
16 devs. And they weren't allowed to pick which tasks they used the AI on. Ridiculous. Also using it on "old and >1 million line" codebases and then extrapolating that to software engineering in general.
Writers like this then theorize why AI isn't helpful, then those "theories" get repeated until it feels less like a theory and more like a fact and it all proliferates into an echo chamber of AI isn't a useful tool. There have been too many anecdotes and my own personal experience to ignore that it isn't useful.
It is a tool and you have to learn it to be successful with it.