[coffeefirst]

Indeed.

All this “productivity” has not resulted in one meaningful open source PR or one interesting indie app launch, and I can’t square my own experience with the hype machine.

If it’s not all hat and no cattle, someone should be able to show me some cows.

[tonyedgecombe]

>I can’t square my own experience with the hype machine.

Me neither. My gut feeling is it's the inexperienced who gain the most from generative AI. That does seem to be confirmed by papers like this:

https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/workers-less-e...

At most I've found it helps with some of the routine work but saving a few minutes typing doesn't offset the problems it creates.

[PeterStuer]

I find it hard to believe the inexperienced would benefit at all. Ai assisted coding requires serious general experience in all matters software to get good value out of it.

[DontchaKnowit]

I find this hard to believe- how would you even know if someone used AI in producing a PR or indie product? Are you omniscient?

Further, there are articles here on HN all the time about people using AI for actual serious work. Heres a pretty significant example :

https://sean.heelan.io/2025/05/22/how-i-used-o3-to-find-cve-...

[azeirah]

I dunno, as an engineer who likes to make side projects, I can say with high certainty that LLMs have helped me compensate for things I'm worse at when coding a product.

I'm good at the engineering side of things, I'm good at UI, I'm good at UX, I'm good at css, I'm just not good at design.

So I tell the LLM to do it for me. It works incredibly well.

I don't know if it's a net increase in productivity for me, but I am absolutely certain that it is a net increase in my ability to ship a more complete product.

[coffeefirst]

That makes perfect sense to me. I’m finding real value in natural language search for code and docs, and “remind me how to do X.”

It’s the extraordinary claims of 10x speed and crazy autopilot that have me looking around for missing cows.

[lazide]

Why do that when they can ignore you and keep living in their bubble?