[Denzel]

We probably work at the same company, given you used MAANG instead of FAANG.

As one of the WAU (really DAU) you’re talking about, I want to call out a couple things: 1) the LOC metrics are flawed, and anyone using the agents knows this - eg, ask CC to rewrite the 1 commit you wrote into 5 different commits, now you have 5 100% AI-written commits; 2) total speed up across the entire dev lifecycle is far below 10x, most likely below 2x, but I don’t see any evidence of anyone measuring the counterfactuals to prove speed up anyways, so there’s no clear data; 3) look at token spend for power users, you might be surprised by how many SWE-years they’re spending.

Overall it’s unclear whether LLM-assisted coding is ROI-positive.

[ben_w]

To add to your point:

If the M stands for Meta, I would also like to note that as a user, I have been seeing increasingly poor UI, of the sort I'd expect from people committing code that wasn't properly checked before going live, as I would expect from vibe coding in the original sense of "blindly accept without review". Like, some posts have two copies of the sender's name in the same location on screen with slightly different fonts going out of sync with each other.

I can easily believe the metrics that all [MF]AANG bonuses are denominated in are going up, our profession has had jokes about engineers gaming those metrics even back when our comics were still printed in books: https://imgur.com/bug-free-programs-dilbert-classic-tyXXh1d

[aspenmartin]

Oh yes all of this I agree with. I had tried to clarify this above but your examples are clearer: my point is: all measures and studies I have personally seen of AI impact on productivity have been deeply flawed for one reason or another.

Total speed up is WAY less than 10x by any measure. 2x seems too high too.

By data alone it’s a bit unclear of impact I agree. But I will say there seems to be a clear picture that to me, starting from a prior formed from personal experience, indicates some real productivity impact today, with a trajectory that suggests these claims of a lot of SWE work being offloaded to agents over the next few years seems not that far fetched.

- adoption and retention numbers internally and externally. You can argue this is driven by perverse incentives and/or the perception performance mismatch but I’m highly skeptical of this even though the effects of both are probably really, it would be truly extraordinary to me if there weren’t at least a ~10-20% bump in productivity today and a lot of headroom to go as integration gets better and user skill gets better and model capabilities grow

- benchmark performance, again benchmarks are really problematic but there are a lot of them and all of them together paint a pretty clear picture of capabilities truly growing and growing quickly

- there are clearly biases we can think of that would cause us to overestimate AI impact, but there are also biases that may cause us to underestimate impact: e.g. I’m now able to do work that I would have never attempted before. Multitasking is easier. Experiments are quicker and easier. That may not be captured well by e.g. task completion time or other metrics.

I even agree: quality of agentic code can be a real risk, but:

- I think this ignores the fact that humans have also always written shitty code and always will; there is lots of garbage in production believe me, and that predates agentic code

- as models improve, they can correct earlier mistakes

- it’s also a muscle to grow: how to review and use humans in the loop to improve quality and set a high bar

[Denzel]

Great response, we’re like 98% aligned at a high-level. :) These next few years will be interesting.