| ▲ | Ianjit 19 hours ago | |
Please provide links to the studies, I am genuinely curious. I have been looking for data but most studies I find showing an uplift are just looking at LOC or PRs, which of course is nonsense. Meta measured a 6-12% uplift in productivity from adopting agentic coding. Thats paltry. A Stanford case study found that after accounting for buggy code that needed to be re-worked there may be no productivity uplift. I haven't seen any study showing a genuine uplift after accounting for properly reviewing and fixing the AI generated code. | ||
| ▲ | kbelder 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | |
>Meta measured a 6-12% uplift in productivity from adopting agentic coding. Thats paltry. That feels like the right ballpark. I would have estimated 10-20%. But I'd say that's not paltry at all. If it's a 10% boost, it's worth paying for. Not transformative, but worthwhile. I compare it to moving from a single monitor to a multi-monitor setup, or getting a dev their preferred IDE. | ||
| ▲ | keeda 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | |
I mention a few here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45379452 > ... just looking at LOC or PRs, which of course is nonsense. That's basically a variation of "How can they prove anything when we don't even know how to measure developer productivity?" ;-) And the answer is the same: robust statistical methods! For instance, amongst other things they compare the same developers over time doing regular day-job tasks with the same quality control processes (review etc.) in place, before and after being allowed to use AI. It's like an A/B test. Spreading across a large N and time duration accounts for a lot of the day-to-day variation. Note that they do not claim to measure individual or team productivity, but they do find a large, statistically significant difference in the data. Worth reading the methodologies to assuage any doubts. > A Stanford case study found that after accounting for buggy code that needed to be re-worked there may be no productivity uplift. I'm not sure if we're talking about the same Stanford study, the one in the link above (100K engineers across 600+ companies) does account for "code churn" (ostensibly fixing AI bugs) and still find an overall productivity boost in the 5 - 30% range. This depends a LOT on the use-case (e.g. complex tasks on legacy COBOL codebases actually see negative impact.) In any case, most of these studies seem to agree on a 15 - 30% boost. Note these are mostly from the ~2024 timeframe using the models from then without today's agentic coding harness. I would bet the number is much higher these days. More recent reports from sources like DX find upto a 60% increase in throughput, though I haven't looked closely at this and have some doubts. > Meta measured a 6-12% uplift in productivity from adopting agentic coding. Thats paltry. Even assuming a lower-end of 6% lift, at Meta SWE salaries that is a LOT of savings. However, I haven't come across anything from Meta yet, could you link a source? | ||