alt Hacker NewsNo productivity from AI is a crazy conclusion to make given the impact we already know it's having on software development. Just because you can't see it in the data yet doesn't mean it's not there, which is what the article you cited says.
Remember too that these models only really became useful less than a year ago with Opus 4.6 being an inflection point. It takes a long time for the economy to reorganize itself so it's not surprising we're not immediately seeing the payoff in economic data.
Replies
Yeah, I talk to normies and nobody still understands the utility of just having a ChatGPT desktop app being able to basically drive your computer and do whatever needs to be done.
Well is there any productivity gain from chatbots? So far, I mostly see a deluge of misleading content disguised as documentation for things that don't even exist. If anything, the amount of slop out there is slowing me down…
I can't imagine it can even feel productive to anyone, unless you use agents to automate re-rolling your slop machines, but then you're just going to end up with an unmaintainable ball of mud. Either way, it's definitely net negative.
Kind of same outcome as if you just generated lots and lots of random code (perhaps at AST level; but don't tell your Claude, that'd trick it into making itself obsolete tech!) and compiled it in parallel till it passed tests, but this time around, the computer also tells you that you hit the nail on its head, that you're totally right <s>and that you're such a good puppy. agent uses tool `clicker`</s>
Of course, when we talk about utilizing AI as an efficient tooling, it is well expected to see the very outcomes you desire. But the point here is the disconnect between the perceived productivity gains and their corresponding measuring metrics. Remember the Goodhart's Law[1]? It becomes fairly unreliable when you try to measure productivity by a set of standards instead of actually producing productivity. When it comes to future about this issue, I'd hope to see the progress actually happening in open source, decentralized AI instead of the current way of using it.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law