Comment by artee_49
3 days ago
Even for senior levels the claim has been that AI will speed up their coding (take it over) so they can focus on higher level decisions and abstract level concepts. These contributions are not those and based on prior predictions the productivity should have gone up.
It would be different I'm sure if they were making contributions to repos they had less familiarity with. In my experience and talking with those who use AI most effectively, it is best leveraged as a way of getting up to speed or creating code for a framework/project you have less familiarity with. The general ratio determining the effectiveness of non-AI coding vs AI coding is the familiarity the user has with the codebase * the complexity of the codebase : the amount of closed-loop abstractions in the tasks the coder needs to carry out.
Currently AI is like a junior engineer, and if you don't have good experience managing junior engineers, AI isn't going to help you as much.
I’ve been doing this for a while now. Junior engineers are pretty near universally terrible when measured by short term ROI. The only reason you would ever want to pay a truly junior engineer is because you can teach them.
If someone told me “you can have a free junior engineer, but they get swapped out each week for a new person”, I’d say no thanks.
I’m sure someone could figure out a way to make money on in that situation, but it wouldn’t be by building anything I’d be comfortable attaching my name to or or would want to use myself