Anyone who has had to unfuck someone else’s work knows it would have been faster to do the work correctly from scratch the first time.

I have an LLM usage mandate in my performance review now. I can’t trust it to do anything important, so I’ll get it to do incredibly noddy things like deleting a clause (that I literally always have highlighted) or generate documentation that’s more long-winded than just reading the code and then go to the bathroom while it happens.

From the blog post referenced:

We do not provide evidence that:

AI systems do not currently speed up many or most software developers

Seems the article should be titled “16 AI coders think they’re 20% faster — but they’re actually 19% slower” - though I guess making us think it was intended to be a statistically relevant finding was the point.

That all said, this was genuinely interesting and is in-line with my understanding of the human psychology that’s at play. It would be nice to see this at a wider scale, broken down across different methodologies / toolsets and models.

I just want to point out that every single heavily downvoted, idiotic pro-AI reply on this post is from a .ml user (with one programming.dev thrown in).

I wonder which way the causation flows.

For each time saved, you’re having that one kink that will slow you down by a fuck ton, something that AI just can’t get right, something that takes ai 5 hours to fix but would’ve taken you 10-20 to write from scratch

As someone that has had to double check peoples code before, especially those that don’t comment appropriately, I’d rather just write it all again myself than try and decipher what the fuck they were even doing.

ahahaha holy shit. I knew METR smelled a bit like AI doomsday cultists and took money from OpenPhil, but those “open source” projects and engineers? One of them was LessWrong.

Here’s a LW site dev whining about the study, he was in it and i think he thinks it was unfair to AI

I think if people are citing in another 3 months time, they’ll be making a mistake

dude $NEXT_VERSION will be so cool

so anyway, this study has gone mainstream! It was on CNBC! I urge you not to watch that unless you have a yearning need to know what the normies are hearing about this shit. In summary, they are hearing that AI coding isn’t all that actually and may not do what the captains of industry want.

around 2:30 the two talking heads ran out of information and just started incorrecting each other on the fabulous AI future, like the worst work lunchroom debate ever but it’s about AI becoming superhuman

the key takeaway for the non techie businessmen and investors who take CNBC seriously ever: the bubble starts not going so great

@dgerard@awful.systems who is your illustrator? These are consistently great.

@dgerard What fascinates me is *why* coders who use LLMs think they’re more productive. Is the complexity of their prompt interaction misleading them as to how effective the outputs it results in are? Or something else?