[hshdhdhj4444]

> This friend told me she can't work without ChatGPT anymore.

Is she more productive though?

People who smoke cigarettes will be unable to work without their regular smoke breaks. Doesn’t mean smoking cigarettes is good for working.

Personally I am an AI booster and I think even LLMs can take us much farther. But people on both sides need to stop accepting claims uncritically.

[fragmede]

> Doesn’t mean smoking cigarettes is good for working.

Fun fact; smoking likely is! There have been numerous studies into nicotine as a nootropic, eg https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1579636/#:~:text=Abstract,sh... which have found that nicotine improves attention and memory.

Shame about the lung cancer though.

[iberator]

Nicotine does not cause cancer. Smoke do

[phatskat]

Yes however nicotine can speed up the growth of existing cancers.

[legucy]

Cigarettes were/are a pretty lucrative business. It doesn’t matter if it’s better or worse, if it’s as addictive as tobacco, the investors will make back their money.

[KoolKat23]

Productive how and for who?

My own use case (financial analysis and data capture by the models). It takes away the grunt work, I can focus on the more pleasant aspects of the job, it also means I can produce better quality reports as I have additional time to look more closely. It also points out things I could have potentially missed.

Free time and boredom spurs creativity, some folks forget this.

I also have more free time, for myself, you're not going to see that on a corporate productivity chart.

Not everything in life is about making more money for some already wealthy shareholders, a point I feel sometimes lost in these discussions, I think some folks need some self-reflection on this point, their jobs don't actually change the world and thinking of the shareholders only gets you so far. (Not pointed at you, just speaking generally).

[johnnyanmac]

>Productive how and for who?

For me, quality is the biggest metric, not money. But time does play into the metric of quality.

The sad reality is that many use it as a shortcut to output slop. Which may be "productive" in a job where that busywork isn't critical for anyone but your paycheck. But those kinds of corners being cut seems anathema to proper engineering or any other mission critical duties.

>their jobs don't actually change the world and thinking of the shareholders only gets you so far.

I'm worried of seeing more cases like a lawyer submitting cases to a judge that never existed. There's ethical concerns about the casual chat apps, but I can leave that to others.

[KoolKat23]

I think this is not really the case, people see through that type of LLM use immediately (busywork). This is demonstrated in the fact that top-down implementations aren't working despite use amongst employees thriving.

People doing their jobs know how to use it effectively. Just because corporates aren't capturing that value for themselves doesn't mean it's low quality. It's being used in a way that is perhaps reflected as an improvement in the actual employees standing, and could be bridging existing outdated work processes. Often an employee is powerless to change these processes and KPI's are notoriously narrow in scope.

Hallucinations happen less frequently these days, and people are aware of the pitfalls so account for this. Literally in my own example above it means I have more time to actually check my own work (and it's work) and it also points out factors I might have missed as a human (this has absolutely happened multiple times already).

[sotix]

> Doesn’t mean smoking cigarettes is good for working.

Au contraire. Acute nicotine improves cognitive deficits in young adults with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00913...

> Non-smoking young adults with ADHD-C showed improvements in cognitive performance following nicotine administration in several domains that are central to ADHD. The results from this study support the hypothesis that cholinergic system activity may be important in the cognitive deficits of ADHD and may be a useful therapeutic target.

[johnnyanmac]

So the best interpretation is that it's like Adderal. Something to be carefully prescribed to with doctor-sanctioned doses. Not something you buy off the counter and smoke a pack a day of.

[aurareturn]

No she’s less productive. She just use it because she wants to do less work, be less likely to get promoted, and have to stay in the office longer to finish her work.

/s

What kind of question is that? Seriously. Are some people here so naive to think that tens of millions out there don’t know when something they choose to use repeatedly multiple times a day every day is making their life harder? Like ChatGPT is some kind of addiction similar to drugs? Is it so hard to believe that ChatGPT is actually productive?

[freehorse]

It is the kind of question that takes into account that people thinking that they are more productive does not imply that they actually are. This happens in a wide range of contexts, from AI to drugs.

[1123581321]

It isn’t a question asked by people generally suspicious of productivity claims. It’s only asked by LLM skeptics, about LLMs.

[happymellon]

It absolutely is a question people ask when suspicious of productivity claims.

Lots of things claim to make people more productive. Lots of things make people believe they are more productive. Lots of things fail to provide evidence of increasing productivity.

This "just believe me" mentality normally comes from scams.

[johnnyanmac]

>It isn’t a question asked by people generally suspicious of productivity claims.

Why not? If you ever got an AI generated email or had to code-review anything vibecoded, you're going to be suspicious on who's "more productive". I've read reports and studies and it feels like the "more productive" people tend to be pushing more work onto people below or beside them to fix the generated mess.

I do believe there are productive ways to use this tech, but it does not seem like many people these days has the discipline to establish a proper workflow.

[rimunroe]

That doesn’t seem to me like a good reason to dismiss the question, and especially not that strongly/aggressively. We’re supposed to assume good intentions on this site. I can think of any number of reasons one might feel more productive but in the end not be going much faster. It would be nice to know more about the subject of the question’s experience and what they’re going off of.

[1123581321]

You’re right; I’m rereading and it’s rude. Thanks.

[danaris]

As a counterexample to your assertion, I've seen it a lot on both sides of the RTO discourse.

[rimunroe]

This is another example of the phenomenon they’re describing, not a counterexample.

[danaris]

...The post I replied to specifically said "It [questioning people's self-evaluation of productivity] is only asked by LLM skeptics, about LLMs".

Naming another example outside of LLM skeptics asking it, about LLMs, is inherently a counterexample.

[freehorse]

Maybe you are not aware of such kinds of topics, but yes it is asked often. It is asked for stimulants, for microdosing psychedelics, for behavioural interventions or workplace policies/processses. Whenever there are any kind of productivity claims, it is asked, and it should be asked.

[tbrownaw]

It's not that hard to review how much you actually got done and check whether it matches how much it felt like you were getting done.

[freehorse]

To do that properly, one needs some kind of control, which is hard to do with one person. It should be doable with proper effort, but far from trivial, because it is not enough to measure what you actually did in one condition, you have to compare it with sth. And then there can be a lot of noise for n=1: when you use LLMs, maybe you happen to have to solve harder tasks. So you need at least to do it over quite a lot of time, or make sure the difficulty of tasks is similar. If you have a group of people, you can put them into groups instead and thus not care as much for these parameters, because you can assume that when you average this "noise" will cancel out.

[fragmede]

The problem isn't a delta between what got done and how much it felt like got done. The problem is it's not known how it would have taken you to do what got done unless you do it twice. Once by hand and once with an LLM, and then compare. Unfortunately, regardless of what you find, HN will be rushing to say N=1, so there's little incentive to report on any individual results.

[emp17344]

In fact, when this was studied, it was found that using AI actually makes developers less productive:

https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...

[coderjames]

> This friend told me she can't work without ChatGPT anymore.

It doesn't say she chooses to use it; it says she can't work without using it. At my workplace, senior leadership has mandated that software engineers use our internal AI chat tooling daily, they monitor the usage statistics, and are updating engineering leveling guides to include sufficient usage of AI being required for promotions. So I can't work without AI anymore, but it doesn't mean I choose to.

[echelon]

Serious thought.

What if people are using LLMs to achieve the same productivity with more cost to the business and less time spent working?

This, to me, feels incredibly plausible.

Get an email? ChatGPT the response. Relax and browse socials for an hour. Repeat.

"My boss thinks I'm using AI to be more productive. In reality, I'm using our ChatGPT subscription to slack off."

That three day report still takes three days, wink wink.

AI can be a tool for 10xers to go 12x, but more likely it's also that AI is the best slack off tool for slackers to go from 0.5x to 0.1x.

And the businesses with AI mandates for employees probably have no idea.

Anecdotally, I've seen it happen to good engineers. Good code turning into flocks of seagulls, stacks of scope 10-deep, variables that go nowhere. Tell me you've seen it too.

[johnnyanmac]

Yeah, I think this is why it's more important to shift the question to "is the team/business more productive". If a 0.5xer manager is pushing 0.1x work and a 1xer teammate needs to become a 1.5xer to fix the slop, then we have this phenomenon where the manager can feel way more productive, while the team under him is spending more time just to fix or throw out his slop.

Both their perspectives are technically right. But we'll either have burned out workers or a lagging schedule as a result in the long term. I miss when we thought more long term about projects.

[mrbungie]

That's Jevons paradox for you.

[y0eswddl]

There's literally a study out the shows when developers think LLMs are making them 20% faster, it turned out to be making them 20% less productive:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089

[spicyusername]

I mean... there are many situations in life where people are bad judges of the facts. Dating, finances, health, etc, etc, etc.

It's not that hard to imagine that your friend feels more productive than she actually is. I'm not saying it's true, but it's plausible. The anecdata coming out of programming is mostly that people are only more productive in certain narrow use cases and much less productive in everything else, relative to just doing the work themselves with their sleeves rolled up.

But man to seeing all that code gets spit out on the screen FEEL amazing, even if I'm going to spend the next few hours needing to edit it, for the next few months managing the technical debt I didn't notice when I merged it.

[mrbungie]

> What kind of question is that? Seriously. Are some people here so naive to think that tens of millions out there don’t know when something they choose to use repeatedly multiple times a day every day is making their life harder?

That's just an appeal to masses / bandwagon fallacy.

> Is it so hard to believe that ChatGPT is actually productive?

We need data, not beliefs and current data is conflicting. ffs.

[bakugo]

You're working under the assumption that punching a prompt into ChatGPT and getting up to grab some coffee while it spits out thousands of tokens of meaningless slop to be used as a substitute for something that you previously would've written yourself is a net upgrade for everyone involved. It's not. I can use ChatGPT to write 20 paragraph email replies that would've previously been a single manually written paragraph, but that doesn't mean I'm 20x more productive.

And yes, ChatGPT is kinda like an addictive drug here. If someone "can't work without ChatGPT anymore", they're addicted and have lost the ability to work on their own as a result.

[KoolKat23]

That's a very broad assumption.

It's no different to a manager that delegates, are they less of a manager because they entrust the work to someone else? No. So long as they do quality checks and take responsibility for the results, wheres the issue?

Work hard versus work smart. Busywork cuts both ways.

[aurareturn]

You’re assuming that there is zero quality check and that managers and clients will accept anything chatgpt generates.

Let’s be serious here. These are still professionals and they have a reputation. The few cases you hear online of AI slop in professional settings is the exception. Not the norm.

[isamuel]

> And yes, ChatGPT is kinda like an addictive drug here. If someone "can't work without ChatGPT anymore", they're addicted and have lost the ability to work on their own as a result.

Come on, you can’t mean this in any kind of robust way. I can’t get my job done without a computer; am I an “addict” who has “lost the ability to work on my own?” Every tool tends to engender dependence, roughly in proportion to how much easier it makes the life of the user. That’s not a bad thing.

[johnnyanmac]

> you can’t mean this in any kind of robust way.

Why not?

>I can’t get my job done without a computer; am I an “addict” who has “lost the ability to work on my own?”

It's very possible. I know people love bescmirching the "you won't always have a calculator" mentality. But if you're using a calculator for 2nd grade mental math, you may have degregaded too far. It varies on the task, of course.

>Every tool tends to engender dependence, roughly in proportion to how much easier it makes the life of the user. That’s not a bad thing.

Depends on how it's making it easier. Phones are an excellent example. They make communication much easier and long distance communication possible. But if it gets to the point where you're texting someone in the next room instead of opening your door, you might be losing a piece of you somewhere.

[danaris]

There's a big difference between needing a tool to do a job that only that tool can do, and needing a crutch to do something without using your own faculties.

LLMs are nothing like a computer for a programmer, or a saw for a carpenter. In the very best case, from what their biggest proponents have said, they can let you do more of what you already do with less effort.

If someone has used them enough that they can no longer work without them, it's not because they're just that indispensable: it's because that someone has let their natural faculties atrophy through disuse.

[bakugo]

> I can’t get my job done without a computer

Are you really comparing an LLM to a computer? Really? There are many jobs today that quite literally would not exist at all without computers. It's in no way comparable.

You use ChatGPT to do the things you were already doing faster and with less effort, at the cost of quality. You don't use it to do things you couldn't do at all before.

[aurareturn]

I can’t maintain my company’s Go codebase without chatgpt.

[johnnyanmac]

>Is it so hard to believe that ChatGPT is actually productive?

Given what I've seen in the educational sector: yes. Very hard. We already had this massive split in extremes between the highly educated and the ones who struggle. The last thing we need is to outsource the aspect of thinking to a billionaire tech company.

The slop you see in the workplace isn't encouraging either.