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Comment by AstroBen

2 days ago

I don't get it? Yes you should require a valid reason before believing something

The only objective measures I've seen people attempt to take have at best shown no productivity loss:

https://substack.com/home/post/p-172538377

https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...

This matches my own experience using agents, although I'm actually secretly optimistic about learning to use it well

29 comments

AstroBen

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johnfn  2 days ago

The burden you are placing is too high here. Do you demand controlled trials for everything you do or else you refuse to use it or accept that other people might see productivity gains? Do you demand studies showing that static typing is productive? Syntax highlighting? IDEs or Vim? Unit testing? Whatever language you use?

Obviously not? It would be absurd to walk into a thread about Rust and say “Rust doesn’t increase your productivity and unless you can produce a study proving it does then your own personal anecdotes are worthless.”

Why the increased demand for rigor when it comes to AI specifically?

  • AstroBen  2 days ago

    Typically I hear how other people are doing things and I test it out for myself. Just like I'm doing with AI

    Actually IDEs vs vim are a perfect analogy because they both have the ability to feel like they're helping a tonne, and at the end of the work day neither group outperforms the other

    I'm not standing on the sidelines criticizing this stuff. I'm using it. I'm growing more and more skeptical because it's not noticably helping me deliver features faster

    At this point I'm at "okay record a video and show me these 3x gains you're seeing because I'm not experiencing the same thing"

    The increased demand for rigor is because my experience isn't matching what others say

    I can see a 25% bump in productivity being realistic if I learn where it works well. There are people claiming 3-10x. It sounds ridiculous

    • bluGill  2 days ago

      I canzt see a 25% jump in productivity because writting code isn't even 25% of what I do. Even if it was infitiely fast I still can't get that high.

      2 replies →

    • Rapzid  2 days ago

      Anecdotally the people who seem to be most adamant about the efficiency of things like vim or Python are some of the slowest engineers I've worked with when it comes to getting shit done. Even compared to people who don't really care for their preferred tech much lol.

      I wonder how many 10x AI bros were 1/10th engineers slacking off most of the week before the fun new tech got them to actually work on stuff.

      Obviously not all, and clearly there are huge wins to be had with AI. But I wonder sometimes..

  • shimman  2 days ago

    I honestly wish we had studies that truly answered these Qs. Modern programming has been a cargo cult for a good 20 years now.

  • llmslave2  2 days ago

    Do you just believe everything everybody says? No quantifiable data required, as long as someone somewhere says it it must be true?

    One of the reasons software is in decline is because it's all vibes, nobody has much interest in conducting research to find anything out. It doesn't have to be some double blinded peer reviewed meta analysis, the bar can still be low, it just should be higher than "I feel like"...

nfw2  2 days ago

Why do you believe that the sky is blue? What randomized trial with proper statistical controls has shown this to be true?