| A lot of the time, AI allows you to exercise basic competence at tasks for which you'd otherwise be incompetent. I think this is why it feels so powerful. You can jump into more or less any task below a certain level of complexity. (eg: you're not going to write an operating system with an LLM but you can set up and configure Wordpress if you'd never done it before.) I think for users this _feels_ incredibly powerful, however this also has its own pitfalls: Any topic which you're incompetent at is one which you're also unequipped to successfully review. I think there are some other productivity pitfalls for LLMs: - Employees use it to give their boss emails / summaries / etc in the language and style their boss wants. This makes their boss happy, but doesn't actually modify productivity whatsoever since the exercise was a waste of time in the first place. - Employees send more emails, and summarize more emails. They look busier, but they're not actually writing the emails or really reading them. The email volume has increased, however the emails themselves were probably a waste of time in the first place. - There is more work to review all around and much of it is of poor quality. I think these issues play a smaller part than some of the general issues raised (eg: poor quality code / lack of code reviews / etc.) but are still worth noting. |
This is completely orthogonal to productivity gains for full time professional developers.