alt Hacker NewsI'm always a little bit skeptical whenever people say that AI has resulted in anything more than a personal 50% increase in productivity.
Like, just stop and think about it for a second. You're saying that AI has doubled your productivity. So, you're actually getting twice as much done as you were before? Can you back this up with metrics?
I can believe AI can make you waaaaaaay more productive in selective tasks, like writing test conditions, making quick disposable prototypes, etc, but as a whole saying you get twice as much done as you did before is a huge claim.
It seems more likely that people feel more productive than they did before, which is why you have this discrepancy between people saying they're 2x-10x more productive vs workplace studies where the productivity gain is around 25% on the high end.
I'm surprised there are developers who seem to not get twice as much done with AI than they did without.
I see it happening right in front of my eyes. I tell the AI to implement a feature that would take me an hour or more to implement and after one or two tries with different prompts, I get a solution that is almost perfect. All I need to do is fine-tune some lines to my liking, as I am very picky when it comes to code. So the implementation time goes down from an hour to 10 minutes. That is something I see happening on a daily basis.
Have you actually tried? Spend some time to write good prompts, use state of the art models (o3 or gemini-2.5 pro) and let AI implement features for you?