well, just assume it's an IDE with 'smarter' autosuggest.

Measuring commit rates is a bad metric. It varies depending on the scope and complexity of what I am doing, and the size of individual commits.

I can increase dramatically my number of commits by breaking up my commits in very small chunks.

Typically when I am using AI I tend to reduce a lot the scope of a commit to make it more focused and easier to handle.

Straight code writing has never been the problem - it's the understanding of said code that is. When you rely on AI, and AI creates something, it might increase productivity immediately but once you need to debug something that uses that piece of code, it will nullify that gain as you have no idea where to look. That's just one aspect of this false equivalency.

Well when I use a power screwdriver I am always impressed by how much more quickly I can finish easy tasks too. I also occasionally busted a screw or three, that then I had to drill out...

So long as you view AI as a sometimes competent liar, then it can be useful.

I've found AI is pretty good at dumb boilerplate stuff. I was able to whip out prototypes, client interfaces, tests, etc pretty fast with AI.

However, when I've asked AI "Identify performance problems or bugs in this code" I find it'll just make up nonsense. Particularly if there aren't problems with the code.

And it makes sense that this is the case. AI has been trained on a mountain of boilerplate and a thimble of performance and bug optimizations.

I also find it great for prompts like:

"this function should do X, spot inconsistencies, potential issues and bugs"

It's eye opening sometimes.

I find AI coding assistants useful when I'm using a new library or language feature I'm not super familiar with.

When I have AI generate code using features I'm very familiar with I can see that it's okay but not premium code.

So it makes sense that I feel more productive but also a little skeptical.

When I see the fabulous images generated by AI, I can't help but wonder how artists feel.

Anyone got a pulse on what the art community thinks?

In a report from Google, who is heavily invested in AI becoming the future, I actually expect the respondents to sound more positive about AI than they actually are

Much like in person I pretend to think AI is much more powerful and inevitable than I actually think it is. Professionally it makes very little sense to be truthful. Sincerity won't pay the bills.

We may see a return to the days when businesses relied on systems analysts, not programmers, to design their information systems—except now, the programming work will be left to the machines.

Or you aren’t as good as you think you are :-)

Almost every person I worked with that is impressed by AI generated code has been a low performer that can’t spot the simplest bugs in the code. Usually the same developers that blindly copy pasted from stack overflow before.

Yes, we created them with social media. Lots of people on this site did that by working for the social media companies.

AI usage like that is a symptom not the problem.

I'm not surprised to see reports like this for open source projects where the bar for contributing is relatively low, but am surprised to see it in the workplace. You'd imagine that devs like that would be filtered out via the hiring process...

I'm a coding tutor and the most frustrating part of my job is when my students use LLM generated code. They have no clue what the code does (or even what libraries they're using) and just care about the pretty output. Whenever I try asking them questions about the code one of them responded verbatim "I dunno" and continued prompting ChatGPT (I ditched that student afterward). Something like Warp where the expectation is to not even interact with the terminal is equally bad as far as I'm concerned since students won't have any incentive to understand what's under the hood of their GUIs.

To be clear, I don't mind people using LLMs to code (I use them to code my SaaS project) but what I do mind is them not even trying to understand wtf is on their screen. This new breed of vibe coders are going to be close to useless in real world programming jobs which when combined with the push targeted at kids that "coding is the future" is going to result in a bunch of below mediocre devs both flooding the market and struggling to find employment.

Why did you I spent 45 min reviewing instead of outright rejecting it? (Honest question.)

> We are creating young people that have a very limited attention span

This isn't about age. I'm in my 40's and my attention span seems to have gotten worse. I don't use much social media anymore either. I see it in other people too regardless of age.

I've just started immediately rejecting AI pull requests. I don't have time for that.

There's going to be a massive opportunity for agencies that are skilled enough to come in and fix all of this nonsense when companies realize what they've invested in.

When neuralink becomes usable, the same hordes of people will rush to install the AI plugin so it can relieve their brains from putting in any effort. The rest will be given a difficult choice: do the same or become unemployable in the new AI economy.

there is a temptation to fight AI slop with AI slop

> We are creating young people that have a very limited attention span, have no incentive to think about things, and have very pleasing metrics on the dora scale. When asked what their code is doing, they just don’t know. They can’t event explain the choices they made.

This has nothing to do with AI, and everything to do with a bad hire. If the developer is that bad with code, how did they get hired in the first place? If AI is making them lazier, and they refuse to improve, maybe they ought to be replaced by a better developer?

I was confused, since DORA is also the EU Digital Operational Resilience Act.

There's a few explanations for this, and it's not necessarily contradictory.

1. AI doesn't improve productivity and people just have cognitive biases. (logical, but I also don't think it's true from what I know...)

2. AI does improve productivity, but only if you find your own workflow and what tasks it's good for, and many companies try to shoehorn it into things which just don't work for it.

3. AI does improve productivity, but people aren't incentivised to improve their productivity because they don't see returns from it. Hence, they just use it to work less and have the same output.

4. The previous one but instead of working less, they work at a more leisurely pace.

5. AI doesn't improve producivity, people just feel it's more productive because it requires less cognitive effort to use than actually doing the task.

Any of these is plausible, yet they have massively different underlying explanations.... studies don't really show why that's the case. I personally think it's mostly 2. and 3., but it could really be any of these.

It's not even claiming that. It's only claiming that people who responded to the survey feel more productive. (Unless you assume that people taking this survey have an objective measure for their own productivity.)

> Significant productivity gains: Over 80% of respondents indicate that AI has enhanced their productivity.

_Feeling_ more productive is inline with the one proper study I've seen.

This seems to be a poll of _users_. "Do people think it has improved _their_ productivity?" is a very different question to "Has it empirically improved aggregate productivity of a team/company/industry." People think _all_ sorts of snake oil improve their productivity; you can't trust people to self-report on things like this.