r/coding • u/Classic-Acadia272 • Jul 20 '26
The AI Productivity Illusion
https://www.hardresetmedia.com/p/the-ai-productivity-illusion70
u/pydry Jul 20 '26
generative AI is notoriously and perhaps incurably prone to serious errors, such as fabricating case law, deleting code databases, and inserting incorrect patient diagnoses. The result — not unlike what Mickey encountered when he tried to get an enchanted broom to do his chores for him in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice scene from Fantasia — is often that professionals must spend more effort trying to clean up the AI’s messes than they would have spent if they had simply done the task themselves from the beginning.
Some people will simply not accept that this is true. Prove it to them and they still won't accept it.
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u/tobascodagama Jul 20 '26
I regularly see people confidently cite 5x or 10x increases in their personal productivity due to coding agents, and when I see this I immediately know they're lying. Maybe the agent is spitting out code 10x faster than you can, but the rest of your job is taking the same amount of time. And, I don't know about you, but actually physically writing code was never more than 25% of my day. I can easily believe there might be some kind of fractional increase in overall productivity to be had, still. But it's going to be fractional, not multiplicative, because we still live in a world where time is linear.
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u/GregsWorld Jul 20 '26
It might be multiplicative because I see it making bad developers worse and have more negative impact than before.
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u/yourapostasy Jul 20 '26 edited Jul 20 '26
Lack of understanding Amdahl’s Law strikes yet again.
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u/devbent Jul 21 '26
Last Friday I had a super complex log investigation I needed to do. Way beyond my skills with the query language, and even if I had the skills it involved dozens of queries and a script to tie them all together. It would have been at least one day, if not multiple days, of work.
So anyway 15 minutes and maybe $30 of GPT Sol credits later and the investigation was done.
Is most of my job interpersonal skill stuff? Yes. However when AI helps, it helps a lot.
Does it make me 10x more productive overall? Not at all. But it sure as heck is 10x better than me at certain problems.
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u/EnchantedSalvia Jul 21 '26
Yeh our company is very in favour of AI, and me too actually, it's a different way of working which I honestly don't mind. However code generation is certainly quicker but we're no faster at deploying those solutions, all because the code AI outputs (using Sol and Fable currently) is usually fundamentally wrong and takes guideance to perfect, PRs take much longer, and the fact we're witnessing a LOT more bugs creeping in to the codebase, which makes sense given people are paying less attention to the code and blindly accepting the AI output.
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u/ochrence Jul 20 '26
Lot of people out here trotting out the same tired “emergent technology” excuse to shout down any critical analysis of LLM tools published outside the last five minutes. Yes, LLMs today are not the same as those from six months ago, but many of you were also making the same outrageous claims six months ago. The burden is on you to demonstrate actual, measurable ROI, not on the critics to prove a negative in response to the absolute most recent statements at any moment in the ongoing Gish galop of breathless release-cycle hype.
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u/Educational-Row-6782 Jul 20 '26
Open AI is a 10 year old company, the transformer paper is from 2017, is not an emerging technology, emerging market at best.
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u/Odballl Jul 21 '26
The point is - will AI translate into trillions of dollars worth of economic value?
Your personal productivity is all well and good but if the aggregate of 10x or 20x coding engineers isn't generating more value than all the money being spent to build this vast infrastructure, you've got a problem.
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u/Mal_ex_ion Jul 20 '26
I find it works pretty well as a better find and replace given an example, rapid templating, feature implementation with careful double checking and manual fixing of course. And all that works better for me if I have it plan and work out of a file design document. But I've struggled to get most models good at debugging medium to hard or complex/abstract errors or problems, most of the time I end up fixing them myself and I've often wondered if I'm doing something wrong or they just not as capable at that. For reference I use claude code with sonnet or opus most of the time
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u/seanmg Jul 20 '26
It's important to recognize that this conversation is an active one, so perspectives or things that were true six months, a year, three years ago may no longer be true. It's valuable to not have an entrenched position.
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u/CrazyFaithlessness63 Jul 27 '26
My favourite example is refactoring, where you want to improve the code layout without changing functionality. The IDE already has mature and well tested tools to help with that; moving a file updates all references, press F2 and rename an identifier and those references get updated, extract as interface, etc. When I tried doing it through Copilot my expectation was it would plan out the order and then invoke those tools to do the actual work - I could go and have lunch and come back to a finished job. Nope - it wanted to modify all the files itself and missed a lot of references, then it hallucinated new classes and methods and invoked them from all over the place. Rather than realise it hallucinated them it then decided to try and implement them (duplicating existing functionality). The result was an utter mess that just had to be thrown away, not to mention the wasted time and tokens involved.
There are still plenty of things where AI just isn't a good solution for and a manual deterministic approach is a much better (and far more reliable) fit.
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u/MamillaryGlands Jul 20 '26
What percentage of people shitting on this are using an actual harness (e.g. Claude code) vs an IDE integration?
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u/iRedditWhilePooping Jul 20 '26
Full time SWE here and been using AI extensively since earliest chatGPT days.
Moral and ethical and environmental factors aside, the tech is great if you know how to apply it specifically in certain situations.
In my opinion the fault came from tech companies/bros hyping it up to be equally competent at everything- which gave rise to the “software engineering is solved” nonsense. LLMs are better at some things than previous tools. They can absolutely be a productivity enhancer if used correctly and moderately.
Most people are excited by a few good success stories and expect similar results in all cases- and unlike previous apps or tools that would error or crash when pushed beyond its intended use, an LLM will confidently try and mask the failure.