Comment by epolanski
16 hours ago
If AI doesn't make you more productive you're using it wrong, end of story.
Even if you don't let it author or write a single line of code, from collecting information, inspecting code, reviewing requirements, reviewing PRs, finding bugs, hell even researching information online, there's so many things it does well and fast that if you're not leveraging it, you're either in denial or have ai skill issues period.
Not to refute your point but I’ve met overly confident people with “AI skills” who are “extremely productive” with it, while producing garbage without knowing, or not being able to tell the difference.
You're describing lack of care and lack of professionalism, fire these people, nothing to do with the tools, it's the person using it the problem.
Yea I’m talking about people and that’s honestly what matters here. At the end of the day this tools is used by people and how people use it plays a big role in how we assess its usefulness.
this is known as the no true scotsman fallacy
We're trying very earnestly to create a world where being careful and professional is a liability. "Move fast and break things, don't ask permission, don't apologize for anything" is the dominant business model. Having care and practicing professionalism takes times and patience, which just translate to missed opportunities to make money.
Meanwhile, if you grift hard enough, you can become CEO of a trillion dollar company or President of the United States. Young people are being raised today seeing that you can raise billions on the promise building self driving cars in 3 years, not deliver even after 10 years, and nothing bad actually happens. Your business doesn't crater, you don't get sued into oblivion, your reputation doesn't really change. In fact, the bigger the grift, the more people are incentivized to prop it up. Care and professionalism are dead until we go back to an environment that is not so nurturing for grifts.
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I've not really seen this outside of extremely junior engineers. On the flip side I've seen plenty of seniors who can't manage to understand how to interact with AI tools come away thinking they are useless when just watching them for a bit it's really clear the issue is the engineer.
They just shovel the garbage on someone else who has to fact check and clean it up.
you can say that about overly confident people with "xyz" skills.
Garbage to whom? Are we talking about something that the user shudders to think about, or something more like a product the user loves, but behind the scenes the worst code ever created?
A lot of important details/parts of a system (not only code) that may seem insignificant to the end user could be really important in making a a system work correctly as a whole.
It sounds like you're the one in denial? AI makes some things faster, like working in a language I don't know very well. It makes other things slower, like working in a language I already know very well. In both cases, writing code is a small percentage of the total development effort.
No I'm not, I'm just sick of these edgy takes where AI does not improve productivity when it obviously does.
Even if you limit your AI experience to finding information online through deep research it's such a time saver and productivity booster that makes a lot of difference.
The list of things it can do for you is massive, even if you don't have it write a single line of code.
Yet the counter argument is like "bu..but..my colleague is pushing slop and it's not good at writing code for me", come on, then use it at things it's good at, not things you don't find it satisfactory.
It "obviously" does based on what, exactly? For most devs (and it appears you, based on your comments) the answer is "their own subjective impressions", but that METR study (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.09089) should have completely killed any illusions that that is a reliable metric (note: this argument works regardless of how much LLMs have improved since the study period, because it's about how accurate dev's impressions are, not how good the LLMs actually were).
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>No I'm not, I'm just sick of these edgy takes where AI does not improve productivity when it obviously does.
Feel free to cite said data you've seen supporting this argument.
My company mandates AI usage and logs AI usage metrics as input to performance evaluation, so I use it every day. It's a Copilot subscription, though.
why though? are they just using it as a proxy for "is 'gitremote' working today?"
The first time i asked it about some code in a busy monorepo and it said "oh bob asked me to do this last week when he was doing X, it works like Y and you can integrate it with your stuff like Z, would you like to update the spec now?"... I had some happy feelings. I dont know how they do it without clobbering the context, but it's great.
Someone in management needs a promotion for his impact in revolutionizing and streamlining development from his charlatan managers.
This is probably where they're getting their "90% of code is written with AI!!) metrics from