Comment by narush
3 days ago
Honestly, this is a fair point -- and speaks the difficulty of figuring out the right baseline to measure against here!
If we studied folks with _no_ AI experience, then we might underestimate speedup, as these folks are learning tools (see a discussion of learning effects in section (C.2.7) - Below-average use of AI tools - in the paper). If we studied folks with _only_ AI experience, then we might overestimate speedup, as perhaps these folks can't really program without AI at all.
In some sense, these are just two separate and interesting questions - I'm excited for future work to really dig in on both!
>If we studied folks with _only_ AI experience, then we might overestimate speedup, as perhaps these folks can't really program without AI at all.
Wouldn't this be an underestimate, since without ai there'd be no forward progress at all? So ai-assisted is infinite speedup if the outputs are good.