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swiftcoderyesterday at 7:40 PM3 repliesview on HN

> it allows me to automate simple things like writing small patches or config changes in a matter of minutes where before I would have invested hours

One of the problems here is that things like this only count as "increased productivity" in the economic sense if it results in more income at the end of the funnel. Are you actually making more product faster in all your new-found free time?

Very few orgs I've worked in have actually been limited by the speed of programmers writing code. Usually it's communication overhead and management processes eating up most of the bandwidth - and those tend to expand to absorb any additional bandwidth.


Replies

drTobiasFunkeyesterday at 11:45 PM

Yup. And in my experience, AI has made the communication and decision making overhead significantly worse thanks to 100x longer docs, code that noone understands and enormous pressure by executives to magically produce software that just works.

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jr3592yesterday at 11:16 PM

> One of the problems here is that things like this only count as "increased productivity" in the economic sense if it results in more income at the end of the funnel. Are you actually making more product faster in all your new-found free time?

This strikes me as a problem with how we define productivity in this context. If I can do my job in 1 hour, when it took me 8 before, am I not more productive in a rate-based sense? Sure, I might only work 5 hours in a week instead of 40, so my net production is the same, but my rate of productivity was certainly much higher.

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ThePhysicistyesterday at 8:31 PM

I mean I can deliver the same software in one month that I delivered in maybe 3 months before and for many things I don't need a dedicated frontend developer, designer or writer anymore. So for me it's the case!