| ▲ | unknownfuture 6 hours ago |
| Okay. Show me the evidence that AI has an impact on productivity when doing design work. Or reducing meeting load. My own experience is that AI doesn't tighten the design cycle, and in fact might extend it by encouraging gold plating. |
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| ▲ | Izkata 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| > Or reducing meeting load. Well, I expect when you've vibed too much and lost track of the code, and can't answer questions in meetings anymore, you'll stop getting invited to them. |
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| ▲ | griffiths 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | How often do you talk about low code details in the meetings? It is mostly about requirements and goals (IMHO) and "architecture"/design, and now I wouldn't even bother my peers with questions about the code as I can let AI tell me how things work exactly as written in the code, not some thing that someone remembers or thinks how it works (in large codebases, most developers only know in detail the things they are working on currently or from recent history) | | |
| ▲ | otabdeveloper4 an hour ago | parent [-] | | > It is mostly about requirements and goals and architecture/design People vibe code because they have no clue about any of that. Not because they're slow typers. |
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| ▲ | 01100011 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It helps me. Case in point, I recently had a API refactoring project that was 80% busywork and only a small amount of code. It's crap work, but it has to be done and it's part of my role. I told AI to generate the initial design doc. It took it upon itself to reference the local headers on my system and found some APIs that should be included that I hadn't even considered would also need to be touched for consistency. It saved me hours typing up the doc, requirements, test plan, etc and then saved me embarrassment by preventing me from making a stupid oversight on a tedious and boring task. |
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| ▲ | sandeepkd 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| From the patterns I have seen people would tend to use the time to build demo's using AI instead of design and then have a back and forth on the demo itself. One has to consider the fact that demo's look more convincing/complete and give an impression that the design decision has been made. In some ways, how agile got rid of the need for explicit & detailed documentation, the AI created demo's will cut the requirements of high level designs too. |
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| ▲ | Exoristos 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | > demo's look more convincing/complete ... In the case of an LLM generated demo, usually deceptively so. > and give an impression that the design decision has been made. In the case of a vibed design, this is the opposite of useful for the team. | | |
| ▲ | sandeepkd 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | The concept of MVP has been there for a while, it felt deceptive too and incurred lot of tech debt. However one would feel the deception only if they understand the missing details. For a lot of roles making decisions it benefits them to ignore the details unless it really bites them |
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| ▲ | simonw 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| What kind of shape of evidence would you find convincing? |
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| ▲ | unknownfuture 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Self-reported or observational data capturing time spent for categories of task ala every other similar study in this space? This isn't exactly novel territory, here, Simon. Let's not pretend I'm asking for something strange, unprecedented, or unreasonable. | | |
| ▲ | simonw 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | How's this? https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/13/datasette-code-frequen... I have similar charts across my three main open source projects: https://github.com/simonw/datasette/graphs/code-frequency https://github.com/simonw/llm/graphs/code-frequency https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-utils/graphs/code-frequency | | |
| ▲ | unknownfuture 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The article mentions that coding is only a fraction of dev time and thus accelerating that part of the job can only create incremental gains, and oh PS, lines of code and similar metrics are a bad way if measuring dev productivity, anyway, and we've known that for decades. The OP claims AI accelerates non-coding parts of the job, too, and so the article is misguided. I ask for evidence. In response you give me... code output metrics? | | |
| ▲ | simonw an hour ago | parent [-] | | I don't have anything else to hand that I can think of. I don't keep a time tracking diary. |
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| ▲ | qsera 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I don't think volume of code changed was the metric the other commenter was asking for. | | | |
| ▲ | the_af 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Isn't this falling into the "lines of code" trap TFA mentions? More code written is not a good measure of productivity. It could be garbage, or redundant code, or simply not addressing the real or more pressing needs, it could be building the wrong thing, etc. Like TFA mentions, it's been known for decades LoC is a misleading metric for productivity. It's one of the lessons of software engineering. | | |
| ▲ | simonw 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I'm planning an article at the moment in defense of lines of code. Saying "lines of code are a bad measurement" is too easy! It's about time someone presented an opposing argument. In my specific case, lines of code for my published open source projects is a metric that I trust, because I have high standards for those. I have plenty of other projects where I'll accept poor quality, unreviewed code (almost all of https://github.com/simonw/tools for example), but Datasette, sqlite-utils and LLM are not that. Of course, that's only useful for me personally and for people who trust me to stick to my own self-declared high standards! | | |
| ▲ | otabdeveloper4 an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | > Lines of code are akshually a good metric now, because that's the only metric LLMs can optimize and I really, really, really love LLMs, they're the bee's knees. Really now? | | | |
| ▲ | skydhash 38 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Saying "lines of code are a bad measurement" is too easy! It's about time someone presented an opposing argument. Maybe because there is none. One of the main quality of good codebase is simplicity. Which is about how easy for someone else to understand the code. It’s hard to define what simplicity looks like, so the best bet is to avoid the other side, making the code too complex. And you can make the code complex by shortening variable name, doing code golfing with quicks of the platforms, so smaller LoC. You can also go the other way and increase the LoC by adding unneeded abstractions, repeating slices of code,… There’s a window where the LoC is perfect to attain simplicity, but that amount is an effect of striving for simplicity, not a cause of it. And it’s variable for every problem. So you got something where the correct value is a different for each case. And trying to manipulate it artificially often results in complex code. And you want to say that is a good metric for productivity? And in the cases of your projects, there are a lot more info could share that are interesting, like the amount of issues (reported or found by you) that are tied to implementation bugs (coding, libraries API breakage,…) or design issues (requirements conflicts,…), documentation improvement,… Anything that is tied to the actual usefulness of the projects, and not fumbling around with code. |
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| ▲ | bluefirebrand 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | People working fewer hours :) | | |
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| ▲ | therealdrag0 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It certainly helps as a research assistant for design work. But it can’t do it for you. |
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| ▲ | cuttothechase 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| [flagged] |
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| ▲ | mountainriver 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| It does because you can now just steamroll features out the door and make everyone look bad that’s sitting around in meetings all day |
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| ▲ | dgellow 25 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Are you aware literally everyone else also has access to AI stuff? You’re not special for using an agent. You’re part of the crowd |
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