As an experienced dev who’s gotten his feet wet a little with AI, I feel like , and does anyone else feel this way, that I spend more time telling AI what to do than it would spend actually writing this all out myself?

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turtletontine a day ago | parent | next [-]

You may have seen headlines about this paper, which found that while most devs (apparently) feel like AI makes them 20% faster, they’re actually 20% SLOWER with it: https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...

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srcreigh a day ago | parent [-]

> We do not provide evidence that:

> AI systems do not currently speed up many or most software developers

> AI systems in the near future will not speed up developers in our exact setting

> There are not ways of using existing AI systems more effectively to achieve positive speedup in our exact setting

	▲	Wowfunhappy a day ago \| parent [-]
		I don't understand how it doesn't provide evidence for the first of these. Sure you can't necessarily extrapolate to all software developers but it's still evidence just not proof.

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askonomm a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yup, entirely gave up on AI as a result, and it didn't help that reviewing and fixing AI code made me incredibly bored to the point that if this somehow becomes the new norm of development, I'll have to find a new career, because I want to actually build things, not manage AI.

	▲	jennyholzer a day ago \| parent [-]
		I agree with this almost completely

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lethologica a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Not a dev but I’ve had similar experiences testing AI to help me craft various documents.

I spend ages crafting the perfect prompt only to cross my fingers and hope that the output is what I want it to be when I could have just spent all that time actually crafting the document exactly as I want it to be in the first place. Often I then need to spend more time editing and tweaking the output from the AI anyway.

I’m honestly starting to feel a little crazy because I’m the only one at my workplace that sees it this way.

	▲	colonCapitalDee a day ago \| parent [-]
		I've found AI to be a poor fit for writing when the task is getting an idea out of my head and on to the page. Works well enough when the task is taking some collection of already written information and creating writing based on it though.

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tfandango a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Absolutely, much harder to describe what I want the software to do in English than logical programming language, and then add to that the time taken to understand the code and make sure it does what was intended. Perhaps the worst part, takes the joy out of it all.

It is nice as a tool to help solve some hairy stuff sometimes.

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JeremyNT 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I usually find this to be the case with an existing codebase, unless I'm doing something extremely generic.

It's just really hard to convert requirements to English when there are a bunch of land mines in there that you know how to avoid.

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rich_sasha a day ago | parent | prev [-]

I find it depends. I just "vibe coded" (I hate this phrase) a simple mobile app for something I needed, without writing a line or code, or indeed ant knowledge of any web/mobile technology. No way realistically I would spend a few days learning Flutter then a few more writing my app.

	▲	pennomi 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That’s the key, really. It’s excellent for small, highly scoped code. But AI doesn’t have the context or experience a senior developer does in the full system architecture of a mid-sized company.