Comment by unknownfuture
3 months ago
Okay.
Show me the evidence that AI has an impact on productivity when doing design work. Or reducing meeting load.
My own experience is that AI doesn't tighten the design cycle, and in fact might extend it by encouraging gold plating.
> Or reducing meeting load.
Well, I expect when you've vibed too much and lost track of the code, and can't answer questions in meetings anymore, you'll stop getting invited to them.
How often do you talk about low code details in the meetings? It is mostly about requirements and goals (IMHO) and "architecture"/design, and now I wouldn't even bother my peers with questions about the code as I can let AI tell me how things work exactly as written in the code, not some thing that someone remembers or thinks how it works (in large codebases, most developers only know in detail the things they are working on currently or from recent history)
> It is mostly about requirements and goals and architecture/design
People vibe code because they have no clue about any of that. Not because they're slow typers.
It helps me. Case in point, I recently had a API refactoring project that was 80% busywork and only a small amount of code. It's crap work, but it has to be done and it's part of my role. I told AI to generate the initial design doc. It took it upon itself to reference the local headers on my system and found some APIs that should be included that I hadn't even considered would also need to be touched for consistency. It saved me hours typing up the doc, requirements, test plan, etc and then saved me embarrassment by preventing me from making a stupid oversight on a tedious and boring task.
AI is helpful in such projects. Less so in other projects where design is heavy
From the patterns I have seen people would tend to use the time to build demo's using AI instead of design and then have a back and forth on the demo itself. One has to consider the fact that demo's look more convincing/complete and give an impression that the design decision has been made. In some ways, how agile got rid of the need for explicit & detailed documentation, the AI created demo's will cut the requirements of high level designs too.
> demo's look more convincing/complete ...
In the case of an LLM generated demo, usually deceptively so.
> and give an impression that the design decision has been made.
In the case of a vibed design, this is the opposite of useful for the team.
The concept of MVP has been there for a while, it felt deceptive too and incurred lot of tech debt. However one would feel the deception only if they understand the missing details. For a lot of roles making decisions it benefits them to ignore the details unless it really bites them
What kind of shape of evidence would you find convincing?
Self-reported or observational data capturing time spent for categories of task ala every other similar study in this space?
This isn't exactly novel territory, here, Simon. Let's not pretend I'm asking for something strange, unprecedented, or unreasonable.
How's this? https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/13/datasette-code-frequen...
I have similar charts across my three main open source projects:
https://github.com/simonw/datasette/graphs/code-frequency
https://github.com/simonw/llm/graphs/code-frequency
https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-utils/graphs/code-frequency
13 replies →
People working fewer hours :)
Damn, looks like we have lower productivity than cavemen!
Sir, this is Capitalism.
Anecdotally I find them helpful for design and I don't find them nearly as helpful for coding (strange, given others experiences reported online)
I am working on a compiler for an OCaml inspired language (I am on a sabbatical) and used them a lot in the early phases to check my ideas and search for prior work. I use them less now (mostly debugging at this point), but have made use of LLMs to write some pieces like source map generation, a couple of small and well known algorithms that were new to me, and an analyzer to dump a schema from a typescript module. Other times I've tried to use it for other things, I have ended up regretting it because of subtle bugs
I don't think it made the design phase any shorter but it definitely helped save me energy in researching and made that period feel less like a fever dream. Design phases can be draining for me so that was welcome
It certainly helps as a research assistant for design work. But it can’t do it for you.
[flagged]
It does because you can now just steamroll features out the door and make everyone look bad that’s sitting around in meetings all day
Are you aware literally everyone else also has access to AI stuff? You’re not special for using an agent. You’re part of the crowd
Depends on where you work... where I happen to work people sit in Jira meetings all day and in the time they talk about it my team implements it.
So yes "literally everyone has access to it" (what a revelation) but you still need to be smart in how you use it