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QuadrupleA 5 hours ago

> everybody who is like me, fully onboarded into AI and agentic tools, seemingly has less and less time available because we fall into a trap where we’re immediately filling it with more things

I do wonder if productivity with AI coding has really gone up, or if it just gives the illusion of that, and we take on more projects and burn ourselves out?

ghurtado 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> I do wonder if productivity with AI coding has really gone up

Here's the thing: we never had a remotely sane way to measure productivity of a software engineer for reasons that we all understand, and we don't have it now.

Even if we had it, it's not the sort of thing that management would even use: they decide how productive you are based on completely unrelated criteria, like willingness to work long hours and keeping your mouth shut when you disagree.

If you ask those types whether productivity has gone up with AI, they'll probably say something like "of course, we were able to let go a third of our programmers and nothing really seems to have changed"

"Productivity" became a poisoned word the moment that the suits realized what a useful weapon it was, and that it was impossible to challenge.

timacles an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What society and America is about to realize is that it really doesn’t matter how productive you are at software and technological innovations when systemic things outside of the economic system are eroding.

It doesn’t matter how fast we can make our widgets and chatbots when what you need is to have a self sufficient workforce. We have outsourced everything material and valuable for society. Now we are left with industries of gambling, ad machines and pharmaceuticals with a government that is functionally bankrupt and politicians that have completely sold out

agumonkey 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A blend of both. You do create more, but the goalposts are always one more step away.

ps: it's strange that YouTubers are talking about the same thing. People in different dev circles. Agentic feels like doom ide scroll.

irishcoffee 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Sounds similar to a slot machine. How odd…

ErroneousBosh 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> I do wonder if productivity with AI coding has really gone up, or if it just gives the illusion of that, and we take on more projects and burn ourselves out?

It definitely hasn't for me. I spent about an hour today trying to use AI to write something fairly simple and I'm still no further forward.

I don't understand what problem AI is supposed to solve in software development.

ghurtado 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> I don't understand what problem AI is supposed to solve in software development.

When Russians invaded Germany during WWII, some of them (who had never seen a toilet) thought that toilets were advanced potato washing machines, and were rightfully pissed when their potatoes were flushed away and didn't come back.

Sounds like you're feeling a similar frustration with your problem.

ErroneousBosh 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I don't really see where that comparison is relevant.

Why is AI supposed to be good?

lawn 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Russians invading Ukraine had some, let's say interesting, reactions to modernities like toilets and washing machines

ghurtado 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Which begs the question: how many of those Russians stealing the appliances also took a potato washer or two?

Philpax 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Apologies for the obligatory question, but what did you try to do, and with which AI did you try to do it with?

ErroneousBosh 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Well following advice from folk on here earlier, I thought I'd start small and try to get it to write some code in Go that would listen on a network socket, wait for a packet with a bunch of messages (in a known format) come in, and split those messages out from the packet.

I ended up having to type hundreds of lines of description to get thousands of lines of code that doesn't actually work, when the one I wrote myself is about two dozen lines of code and works perfectly.

It just seems such a slow and inefficient way to work.

timacles 43 minutes ago | parent [-]

Hate to pull the skill issue card here, but that is a trivial problem that can be one shotted with almost any model with