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Comment by megaloblasto

6 months ago

100% productivity gains on coding tasks are absolutely within the realm of possibility

It is possible to say the same about the low code solutions, e.g. a perfect UI can be used instead of writing a single line of code. The problem is that creating such a system is too resource intensive and counterproductive, and such a system does not exist. Similarly coding has always some problem that cannot be generalised due to the non existent pattern in training, and creating such a pattern beats the goal of having such a system.

And how much of productivity loss due to the insane amount of noise being generated ? (filler ridden reports, emails, videos, podcasts, &c.)

  • I'm talking about 100% net gain in productivity.

    • You're talking about net gains in "coding tasks" productivity, I'm talking in productivity gain across the board.

      My company deals with an insane amount of customers who use chatgpt to pre-debug their problems before coming to our support. Once they contact our support they regurgitate llm generated BS to our support engineers thinking they're going to speed up the process, the only thing they're doing is generating noise that slows everyone down because chatgpt has absolutely no clue about our product and keeps sending them on wild goose chases. Sometimes they even lie pretending "a colleague" steered them in this or that direction while it's 100% obvious the whole thing was hallucinate and even written by an llm.

      I can't tell you how frustrating it is to read a 10 min long customer email just to realise it's just an llm hallucinating probable causes for a bug that takes 2 sentences to describe.

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If that is the case, I would argue that you were taking money for doing a job that should've been automated or abstracted already.

  • I would disagree. I would argue that if you aren't seeing gains in your productivity, you're either using the tools incorrectly, or you are in some ultra specific niche area of coding that AI isn't helpful on yet.