Comment by TheCleric
5 days ago
I am so glad someone else has this same experience as me because everyone else seems all in and I feel like I’m staring at an emperor without clothes.
5 days ago
I am so glad someone else has this same experience as me because everyone else seems all in and I feel like I’m staring at an emperor without clothes.
The truth often lies somewhere in between
My personal experience indicates this, AI enhances me but cannot replace me
Been doing something closer to pair programming to see what "vibe" coding is all about (they are not up to being left unattended)
See recent commits to this repo
https://github.com/blebbit/at-mirror/commits/main/
You are not alone. There are plenty of us, see here:
- Claude Code is a Slot Machine https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...
So, if the study showed experienced developers had a decline in productivity, and some developers claim gains in theirs, there is high chance that the people reporting the gains are...less experienced developers.
See, some claim that we are not using LLMs right (skills issue on our part) and that's why we are not getting the gains they do, but maybe it's the other way around: they are getting gains from LLMs because they are not experienced developers (skills issue on their part).
I'll wait for more studies about productivity, one data point is not solid foundation, there are a lot of people who want this to be true, and the models and agent systems are still getting better
I'm an experience (20y) developer and these tools have saved me many hours on a regular basis, easily covering the monthly costs many times over
There’s not enough data…which somehow proves your pre-existing bias which goes against the only data we have.
6 replies →
Your comments are citing this blog post and arxiv preprint.
You are also misrepresenting the literature. There are many papers about LLMs and productivity. You can find them on Google Scholar and elsewhere.
The evidence is clear that LLMs make people more productive. Your one cherry picked preprint will get included in future review papers if it gets published.
Good thing you linked to these articles that support your claims, otherwise I would be left feeling like you are misrepresenting the literature to push your own agenda.
5 replies →
> So, if the study showed experienced developers had a decline in productivity,
You forgot to add: first time users, and within their comfort zone. Because it would be completely different result if they were experienced with AI or outside of their usual domain.
What were you using? Did you use it for a real project? I ask because you're going to have a vastly different experience with Cursor than with Claude Code, for example.
My work has offered us various tools. Copilot, Claude, Cursor, ChatGPT. All of them had the same behavior for me. They would produce some code that looks like it would work but hallucinate a lot of things like what parameters a function takes or what libraries to import for functionality.
In the end, every tool I tried felt like I was spending a significant amount of time saying “no that won’t work” just to get a piece of code that would build, let alone fit for the task. There was never an instance where it took less time or produced a better solution than just building it myself, with the added bonus that building it myself meant I understood it better.
In addition to that I got into this line of work because I like solving problems. So even if it was as fast and as reliable as me I’ve changed my job from problem solver to manager, which is not a trade I would make.
Didn’t take long for the “you’re using the wrong tool / holding the tool wrong” replies to appear.
Knowing how to search prompt Google became a skill among programmers, so has prompt/context engineering
7 replies →
It's really odd to me that pointing this out is used as some kind of counterargument. On its own that makes no sense.
Consider that the frequency of replies along those lines might be evidence that there's something to it. It's not necessarily true, of course, but if it's false then you need to explain why so many people believe otherwise.