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Comment by someuser54541

9 days ago

My team is doing the same, and yet all of us still aren't sure that we're actually more productive overall.

If anything it seems to me like we've just swapped coding with what is effectively a lot more code review (of whatever the LLM spits out), at the cost of also losing that long term understanding of a block of code that actually comes from writing it yourself (let's not pretend that a reviewer has the same depth of understanding of a piece of code as an author).

If you work in a team then you are likely already not writing most of the code yourself.

There will be point where ai will consistently write better prs - you can already start to see it here and there - finding and fixing bugs in existing code, refactoring, writing tests, writing and updating documentation and prototyping are some examples of areas where it often surpasses human contribution.

  • All the comments of AI writing code and making PRs remind me a lot of all the promises about self driving cars. That was more than 10 years ago and today I still don't know anybody that has a car that drives itself. Will AI write useful PRs one day? Probably. Will it do that before I retire or die of old age? Considering I have been using agents for about a year or so, and seen little to no improvement in that time, I'm afraid the current version of AI probably has already peaked and we'll only see marginal improvement due to diminishing returns.

Yes there is a very real trade off between labour and capital.

In the past the tradeoff has been very straight forward. But this is a unique situation because it involves knowledge and not just the physicality of the human in regards to productivity.