CTO says 93% of developers use AI, but productivity is still 10%

This is self-reported productivity, in that devs are saying AI saves them about 4 hours per week. But let’s not forget the METR study that found a 20% increase in self-reported productivity but a 19% decrease in actual measured productivity.

(It used a clever and rigorous technique for measuring productivity differences, BTW, for anyone as skeptical of productivity measures as I am.)

You're only as fast as your biggest bottleneck. Adding AI to an existing organization is just going to show you where your bottlenecks are, it's not going to magically make them go away. For most companies, the speed of writing code probably wasn't the bottleneck in the first place.

My biggest road blocks as an engineer has almost never been the authorship of code but everything else around it.

* Getting code reviewed

* Making sure its actually solving the problem

* Communicating to the rest of the team whats happening

* Getting tests to pass

* Getting it deployed

* Verifying that the fix is implemented in production

* Starting it all over when there is a misunderstanding

Slinging more code faster is great and getting unit testing more-or-less for free is awesome but the separation between a good and great engineer is one of communication and management.

AI is causing us to regress to thinking that code velocity is a good metric to use when comparing engineers.

Apparently "AI is speeding up the onboarding process", they say. But isn't that because the onboarding process is about learning, and by having an AI regurgitate the answers you can complete the process without learning anything, which might speed it up but completely defeats the purpose?

I think that over time people will start looking at AI-assisted coding the same way we now look at loosely typed code, or at (heavy) frameworks: it saves time in the short term, but may cause significant problems down the line. Whether or not this tradeoff makes sense in a specific situation is a matter of debate, and there's usually no obviously right or wrong answer.

Unsurprising for multiple reasons. Most organizations have other bottlenecks and limiting factors than “how fast can you develop”.

Regardless, if you’re a dev who is now 2x as productive in terms of work completed per day, and quality remains stable, why should this translate to 2x the output? Most people are paid by the hour and not for outcomes.

And yes, I am suggesting that if you complete in 4 hours that which took you 8 hours in 2019, that you should consider calling it a day.

How are CTO's so out of touch and yet loud and proud about it.

I think some AI companies are just now starting to feel the pressure to profit.

Soon, I predict we will see a pretty significant jump in price that will make a 10% productivity gain seem tiny compared to the associated bills.

For now, these companies are trying to reach critical mass so their users are so dependant on their tech that they have to keep paying at least in the short term.

I found the title for this post misleading. To clarify it a bit, AI has only improved productivity by 10% even though 93% of devs are using it.

As far as I can tell from my workplace the total impact on productivity is neutral to negative.

I read this article as the CTO being the bottleneck if he's only seeing 10% productivity boost at his organization.

I dont think this is a purely AI problem more with the legacy costs of maintaining many minds that can't be solved by just giving people AI tools until the AI comes for the CTO role (but not CEO or revenue generating roles) too and whichever manager is bottlenecking.

I imagine a future where we have Nasdaq listed companies run by just a dozen people with AI agents running and talking to each other so fast that text becomes a bottleneck and they need another medium that can only be understood by an AI that will hold humans hand

This shift would also be reflected by new hardware shifts...perhaps photonic chips or anything that lets AI scale up crazy without the energy cost....

Exciting times are ahead AI but it's also accelerating digital UBI....could be good and bad.

A 10% uplift in productivity for the cost of probably 0.001% of the salary budget is an incredible success.

The title is misleading. Productivity isn't at 10%, it's at 110%.

AI adoption has reduced productivity at my workplace, and by a noticeable amount!

Blunt opinion: Most devs are not that good and really only execute what they are told to do.

The threat of AI for devs, and the way to drastically improve productivity is there: keep the better devs who can think systemically, who can design solutions, who can solve issues themselves and give them all the AI help available, cut the rest.

I can see where productivity could be higher if all I did was type in programs to some spec, or bootstrapping new apps all day - but that's like not the reality of "programming", at least for me past 25 years. Sorting through what to even make and interpreting "requirements" is what takes the most time

Yeah, industry has told them that devs aren't valuable and AI can do their job. Who TF has motivation after that?

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