alt Hacker NewsI'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?
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> I'm surprised there are developers who seem to not get twice as much done with AI than they did without.
I think it depends a lot on what you work on. There are tasks that are super LLM friendly, and then there are things that have so many constraints that LLM can basically never get it right.
For example, atm we have some really complicated pieces of code that needs to be carefuly untangled and retangled to accomodate a change, and we have to be much more strategic about it to make sure we don't regress anything during the process.
Can you share a little bit about what your prompting is like, especially for large code bases? Do you typically restrict context to a single file/module or are you able to manage project wide changes? I'm struggling to do any large scale changes as it just eats through tokens and gets expensive very fast. And the quality of output also drops off as the context grows.
There are specific subsets of work at which it can sometimes be a huge boost. That’s a far cry from making me 2x more productive at my job overall.
I mean, I don't disagree with you when you say that something that would take an hour or more to implement would only take 10 minutes or so with AI. That kind of aligns with my personal experience. If something takes an hour, it's probably something that the LLM can do, and I probably should have the LLM do it unless I see some value in doing it myself for knowledge retention or whatever.
But working on features that can fit within a timebox of "an hour or more" takes up very little of my time.
That's what I mean, there are certain contexts where it makes sense to say "yeah, AI made me 2x-10x more productive", but taken as a whole just how productive have you become? Actually being 2x productive as a whole would have a profound impact.
Even if what you are saying is true, a significant part of a developer's time is not writing code, but doing other things like thinking about how to best solve a problem, thinking about the architecture, communicating with coworkers, and so on.
So, even if AI helps you write code twice as fast, it does not mean that it makes you twice as productive in your job.
Then again, maybe you really have a shitty job at a ticket factory where you just write boilerplate code all day. In which case, I'm sorry!