Comment by whobre
8 days ago
That's exactly what's happening. Many claim they are more productive with AI, but individual rise in productivity just doesn't translate to projects being completed any sooner.
And by "projects", I mean corporate ones with big teams involved. Hobby projects actually do get finished much faster.
In the corporate world, writing code was always a small chunk anyway. Iirc something like 30% of employee time. Getting 50% faster there still only gains back 10% of your time.
To further complicate matters, you had to spend on AI software and potentially additional on legal/risk/security/compliance to enable that.
The smaller the company, the bigger that % of coding is of total time (all the way down to hobby where the majority of time is spent coding)
Where I work, I would guess that, out of the amount of person-hours spent on a project, less than 5% of it is the cumulative time spent designing and writing code. There's so much other stuff going on: Requirements gathering, "aligning" with other teams, human reviews, QA, presenting to executives, waiting for approval from executives, reporting status, deploying to staging, internal dogfooding, slow ramp-ups to production... This is how projects that are 50 lines of code take 3 months to deploy. AI is helping reduce the time spent on that 2%.