Comment by ath3nd

5 days ago

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

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.

> 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.