Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by __turbobrew__ 129 days ago
Honestly, that is a “skill issue” as the kids these days say. When used properly and with skill, agents can increase your productivity. Like any tool, use it wrong and your life will be worse off. The logically consistent view if you want to believe this study and my experience is that the average person is hindered by using AI because they do not have the skills, but there are people out there who gain a net benefit.
2 comments

It drives me nuts that people take the mean of AI code generation results and use that to make claims about what AI code generation is possible of. It's like using the mean basketball player to argue that people like LeBron and Jordan don't exist.
No, we just want to point out not everybody utilizing agents ends up like LeBron or Jordan - most are Brian Scalabrine.
For sure. I like having discussions with nuanced takes, these are tools with strengths and weaknesses and being a good tool user includes knowing when not to pick it up.
It’s a skill issue, which means you can’t fire any of your highly skilled employees, which means it has the same value as any other business organization tool like Jira or Microsoft Excel, approximately $10-20 per user per month.

Autodesk Fusion for manufacturing costs less than Claude Max and you literally can’t do your job without it.

So Autodesk takes you from 0 to 100% productivity for under $200 a month and companies are expected to pay $200+ to gain an extra 10-20%?

That math isn’t how it works with any other business logic tools.