Comment by ath3nd
4 days ago
The only study currently trying to measure productivity of experienced devs using LLMs showed they suffer a 19% decline in productivity.
https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...
Since that study demonstrated that experienced developers currently suffer a decline in their productivity when using LLMs, it's perfectly likely that less experienced/junior developers who normally will struggle with syntax or simple tasks like organizing their code are the ones experiencing the boost of productivity from LLMs.
Thus, it seems the devs benefitting the most from LLMs are the ones with the skill issue/more junior/early in their career.
Which group do you belong to?
No, it's just logical, LLM is a useful tool, those experienced are just code monkeys that whey they got stuck.
> No, it's just logical, LLM is a useful tool
How open are you to the possibility that it's the other way around? Because the study suggests that it's actually junior code monkeys that benefit from LLMs, and experienced software engineers don't instead get a decline of their productivity.
At least that's what the only available study so far shows.
That's corroborated with my experience mentoring juniors, the more they struggle with basic things like syntax or expressing their thoughts clearly in code, the more benefit they got from using LLM tools like Claude.
Once they go mid-level and above, the LLMs are a detriment to them. Do you currently get big benefit from LLMs? Maybe you are more early in your career?
I think you are making a couple of very good points getting bogged down in the wrong framework of discussion. Let me rephrase what I think you are saying:
Once you are very comfortable in a domain, it is detrimental to have to wrangle a junior dev with low IQ, way too much confidence but encyclopediac knowledge of everything instead of just doing it yourself.
The dichotomy of Junior vs. Senior is a bit misleading here, every junior is uncomfortable in the domain they are working in, but a Senior probably isn't comfortable in all domains. For example, many people with 10+ SE experience I know aren't very good with databases and data engineering, which is becoming an increasingly large part of the job. For someone who has worked 10+ years on Java Backends, now attempting to write Pythin data pipelines, Coding Agents might be a useful tool to gap that bridge.
The other thing is creation vs. critique. I often let my code, writing and planning be rewiewed by Claude or Gemini, because once I have created something, I know it very well, and I can very quickly go through 20 points of criticism/recommendations/tips and pick out the relevant ones. - And honestly, that has been super helpful. Using it that way around, Claude has caught a number of bugs, taught me some new tricks and made me aware of some interesting tech.
Those "experienced" actually are just senior code monkeys if u ask me, it's trivial right ? I don't assume the reason why, but it's just illogical for a junior to get benefits and the seniors don't. The wrong ones here is the "experienced".
I know how to use the AI tools for my purpose (that's why i use them), and of course, to make the impossible possible. Even if i failed to do so, it's not the decrease in productivity because without them, i don't think i can do better than the LLM.
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