[slopinthebag]

You know when someone is singing the praises about AI and they get asked "if you're so much more productive with AI, what have you built with it"? Well I think a bunch of companies are asking this same question to their employees and realising that the productivity gains they are betting on were overhyped.

LLM's can be a very useful tool and will probably lead to measurable productivity increases in the future, at their current state they are not capable of replacing most knowledge workers. Remember, even computers as a whole didn't measurably impact the economy for years after their adoption. The real world is a messy place and hard to predict!

[edoceo]

> measurable productivity

Which measure? Like when folk say something is more "efficient" it's more time-efficient to fly but one trades other efficiency. Efficiency, like productivity needs a second word with it to properly communicate.

Whtys more productive? Lines of code (a weak measure). Features shipped? Bugs fixed? Time by company saved? Time for client? Shareholders value (lame).

I don't know the answer but this year (2026) I'm gonna see if LLM is better at tax prep than my 10yr CPA. So that test is my time vs $6k USD.

[bluGill]

Time could be very expensive as mistakes on taxes can be fraud resulting in prison time. Mostly they understand people make mistakes - but they need to look like honest mistakes and llm may not. remember you sign your taxes as correct to the best of your knowledge - your CPA is admitting you outsourced understanding to an expert, something they accept. However if you sign alone you are saying you understand it all even if you don't.

[ineedasername]

These days productivity at a macroeconomic scale is usually cited in something like GDP per hour worked.

Most recent BLS for the last quarter ‘25 was an annualized rate of 5.4%.

The historic annual average is around 2%.

It’s a bit early to draw a conclusion from this. Also it’s not an absolute measure. GDP per hour worked. So, to cut through any proxy factors or intermediating signals you’d really need to know how many hours were worked, which I don’t have to hand.

That said, in general macro sense, assuming hours worked does not decrease, productivity +% and gdp +% are two of the fundamental factors required for real world wage gains.

If you’re looking for signals in either direction on AI’s influence on the economy, these are #s to watch, among others. The Federal Reserve, the the Chair reports after each meeting, is (IMO) one of the most convenient places to get very fresh hard #s combined with cogent analysis and usually some q&a from the business press asking questions that are at least some of the ones I’d want to ask.

If you follow these fairly accessible speeches after meetings, you’ll occasionally see how lots of the things in them end up being thematic in lots of the stories that pop up here weeks or months later.

[_delirium]

Economy-wide productivity can be measured reasonably well, although there are a few different measures [1]. The big question I guess is whether AI will make a measurable impact there. Historically tech has had less impact than people thought it would, as noted in Robert Solow's classic quip that "You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics". [2]

[1] https://www.oecd.org/en/topics/sub-issues/measuring-producti...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox

[Bombthecat]

Try agent zero, you can then upload your bank ( or credit card) statements in CSV etc. It then can analyse it

[another_twist]

Number of features shipped. Traction metrics. Revenue per product. Ultimately business metrics. For example, tax prep effectiveness would be a proper experiment tied to specific metrics.

[belter]

I used to write bugs in 8 hours. Now I write the same bugs in 4. My Productivity doubled. \s

[Morromist]

I hear this every day, and I'm sure its true sometimes, but where is the tsunami of amazing software LLM users are producing? Where are the games that make the old games look like things from a bygone era? Where are the updates to the software that I currently use that greatly increase it capabilities? I have seen none of this.

I get that it takes a long time to make software, but people were making big promises a year ago and I think its time to start expecting some results.

[pickettd]

Reddit and GitHub are littered with people launching new projects and appear to be way more feature-rich than new tool/app launches from previous years. I think it is a lot harder to get noticed with a new tool/app new because of this increase in volume of launches.

Also weekend hackathon events have completely/drastically changed as an experience in the last 2-3 years (expectations and also feature-set/polish of working code by the end of the weekend).

And as another example, you see people producing CUDA kernels and MLX ports as an individual (with AI) way more these days (compared to 1-2 years ago), like this: https://huggingface.co/blog/custom-cuda-kernels-agent-skills

[sarchertech]

I have no way of verifying any of those. Something I can easily verify, new games launched on steam.

January numbers are out and there were fewer games launched this January than last.

[davely]

I’d be interested where you’re getting your data. SteamDB shows an accelerating trend of game releases over time, though comparing January 2026 to January 2025 directly shows a marginal gain [0].

This chart from a16z (scroll down to “App Store, Engage”) plots monthly iOS App Store releases each month and shows significant growth [1].

> After basically zero growth for the past three years, new app releases surged 60% yoy in December (and 24% on a trailing twelve month basis).

It’s completely anecdotal evidence but my own personal experience shows various sub-Reddit’s just flooded with AI assisted projects now, so much so that various pages have started to implement bans or limits of AI related posts (r/selfhosted just did this).

As far as _amazing software_ goes, that’s all a bit subjective. But there is definitely an increase happening.

[0] https://steamdb.info/stats/releases/

[1] https://www.a16z.news/p/charts-of-the-week-the-almighty-cons...

[kelipso]

Specifically about custom CUDA kernels, I’ve implemented them with AI that significantly sped up the code in this project I worked on. Didn’t know how to code these kernels at all, but I implemented and tested a couple of variations and got it running fast in just two days. Basically impossible for me before AI coding (well not impossible but it would have taken me many weeks, so I wouldn’t have tried it).

[Bombthecat]

Or just don't publish them, because they don't want to deal with uses.

I wrote a python DHCP server which connects with proxmox server to hand out stable IPs as long as the VM / container exists in proxmox.

Not via MAC but basically via VM ID ( or name)

[AnthonyMouse]

The one thing AI is consistently better at than humans is shipping quickly. It will give you as much slop as you want right away, and if you push on it for a short period of time it will compile and if you run it a program will appear that has a button for each of the requested features.

Then you start asking questions like, does the button for each of the features actually do the thing? Are there any race conditions? Are there inputs that cause it to segfault or deadlock? Are the libraries it uses being maintained by anyone or are they full of security vulnerabilities? Is the code itself full of security vulnerabilities? What happens if you have more than 100 users at once? If the user sets some preferences, does it actually save them somewhere, and then load them back properly on the next run? If the preferences are sensitive, where is it saving them and who has access to it?

It's way easier to get code that runs than code that works.

Or to put it another way, AI is pretty good at writing the first 90% of the code:

    "The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time." — Tom Cargill, Bell Labs

[copperx]

Nowadays there are DOZENS of apps being launched solving the same problem.

Have you ever looked for, say, WisprFlow alternatives? I had to compare like 10 extremely similar solutions. Apps have no moat nowadays.

That's happening all over the place.

[sarchertech]

Look somewhere outside of the AI hype space. You’re seeing more AI competitors because it’s easy to build on top of someone’s existing model or API and everyone is trying to cash in. You saw the same thing with new crypto currency.

[Bombthecat]

Just check foundry vtt and it's modules. The amount of modules released exploded since AI.

[sarchertech]

That’s an incredibly niche area. From their website it looks like there are 4k modules available. Is there a way to see historical data. Also is number of users available, so that you can rule out popularity growth?

[Bombthecat]

Hmm no I don't think they publish data about buyers or players.

But the numbers of lfg is basically the same, maybe a few percent more. But not dozens of modules more per day more...

[SoftTalker]

Even better, I write more bugs in 4 hours than I used to in 8.

[collingreen]

And the bugs take me WAY longer to find and fix now!

[pfdietz]

A 10x employee creates enough bugs to keep 10 other employees busy.

[re-thc]

10 other agents.

[pfdietz]

"I'm ten times the agent you are, agent 8.6!"

[belter]

"If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in."

- Edsger Dijkstra

[johnsmith1840]

I bet you the predictions are largely correct but technology doesn't care about funding timelines and egos. It will come in its own time.

It's like trying to make fusion happen only by spending more money. It helps but it doesn't fundamentally solve thr pace of true innovation.

I've been saying for years now that the next AI breakthrough could come from big tech but it also has just a likely chance of comming from a smart kid with a whiteboard.

[slopinthebag]

Well, the predictions are tied to the timelines. If someone predicts that AI will take over writing code sometime in the future I think a lot of people would agree. The pushback comes from suggesting it's current LLMs and that the timeline is months and not decades.

[echelon]

> I've been saying for years now that the next AI breakthrough could come from big tech but it also has just a likely chance of comming from a smart kid with a whiteboard.

It comes from the company best equipped with capital and infra.

If some university invents a new approach, one of the nimble hyperscalers / foundation model companies will gobble it up.

This is why capital is being spent. That is the only thing that matters: positioning to take advantage of the adoption curve.

[johnsmith1840]

Yes scaling is always capitol hungry but the innovation itself is not

[milchek]

I think for a lot of folks it basically comes down to just using AI to make the tasks they have to do easier and to free up time for themselves.

I’d argue the majority use AI this way. The minority “10x” workers who are using it to churn through more tasks are the motivated ones driving real business value being added - but let’s be honest, in a soulless enterprise 9-5 these folks are few and far between.

[sarchertech]

Sure but why haven’t you seen a drastic increase in single person startups.

Why are there fewer games launched in steam this January than last?

[vidarh]

Because very few knows how to use AI. I teach AI courses on the side. I've done auditing supervised fine tuning and RLHF projects for a major provider. From seeing real prompts, many specifically from people who work with agents every day, people do not yet have the faintest clue how to productively prompt AI. A lot of people prompt them in ways that are barely coherent.

Even if models stopped improving today, it'd take years before we see the full effects of people slowly gaining the skills needed to leverage them.

[sarchertech]

Sure there are people holding it wrong.

But there are thousands of people on social media claiming huge productivity gains. Surely at least 5% of devs are holding it right.

If a 10x boost is possible, we’d notice that. There are only 20k games a year released on steam.

If my hypothesis is true and the real final output boost is somewhere near 20%, we’re seeing exactly what you’d expect.

[hackingonempty]

I'd love to look at what you consider to be good prompts if you could provide a link.

[vidarh]

You'd be surprised how low the bar is. What I'm seeing is down to the level of people not writing complete sentences.

There doesn't need to be any "magic" there. Just clearly state your requirements. And start by asking the model to plan out the changes and write a markdown file with a plan first (I prefer this over e.g. Claude Code's plan mode, because I like to keep that artefact), including planning out tests.

If a colleague of yours not intimately familiar with the project could get the plan without needing to ask followup questions (but able to spend time digging through the code), you've done pretty well.

You can go over-board with agents to assist in reviewing the code, running tests etc. as well, but that's the second 90%. The first 90% is just to write a coherent request for a plan, read the plan, ask for revisions until it makes sense, and tell it to implement it.

[nunez]

Not surprising. Many folks struggle with writing (hence why ChatGPT is so popular for writing stuff), so people struggling to coherently express what they want and how makes sense.

But the big models have come a long way in this regard. Claude + Opus especially. You can build something with a super small prompt and keep hammering it with fix prompts until you get what you want. It's not efficient, but it's doable, and it's much better than having to write a full spec not half a year ago.

[munch117]

> Just clearly state your requirements.

Nothing new here. Getting users to clearly state their requirements has always been like pulling teeth. Incomplete sentences and all.

If the people you are teaching are developers, they should know better. But I'm not all that surprised if many of them don't. People will be people.

[gsnedders]

One thing that I’ve often seen is models, when very much told to just write a plan, still including sizeable amounts of code in the plan.

Maybe it’s needing to step back and even ask for design doc before a plan, but even then…

[rustystump]

Because ai doesnt work like this “make me money” or “make stardew valley in space”. The hard part is the painful exploration and necessary taste to produce something useful. The number of these kind of people did not increase with ai.

Eg, ai is a big multiplier but that doesnt mean it will translate to “more” in the way people think.

[sarchertech]

It doesn’t need to be useful or a good game to launch on steam. Surely if it was a “big multiplier” 5-10x, it would be noticeably impacting steam launches.

Now if it’s something closer to 20%, we’re seeing exactly what you’d expect.

[milchek]

It comes down back to that whole discussion around intelligence becoming cheaper and more accessible but motivation and agency remaining stable.

I’ve worked with a few folks who have been given AI tools (like a designer who never coded in his life, a or video/content creator) who have absolutely taken off with creating web apps and various little tools and process improvements for themselves thanks by just vibecoding what they wanted. The key with both these individuals is high agency, curiosity, and motivation. That was innate, the AI tooling just gave them the external means to realise what they wanted to do with more ease.

These kinds of folks are not the majority, and we’re still early into this technological revolution imo (models are improving on a regular basis).

In summary, we’ve given the masses to “intelligence” but creativity and motivation stay the same.

[sarchertech]

Yeah but if it’s 100x easier to do something, it takes much less motivation to push through and finish it.

If you look at every game dev forum in existence, or you’ve ever talked to people about why they got into CS there are probably 1000x more people who want to publish a game than have done it.

If there was a a tool that provided a 10x-100x speed boost it would push enough of those people over the edge and make a significant impact on number of games released.

That’s to say nothing of boosting existing game devs.

[h14h]

My guess is that the true impact of this will be difficult to measure for a while. Most "single-person start-ups" will probably not be high-visibility VC-backed, YC affairs, and rather solopreneurs with a handful of niche moonlighted apps each making 3-4 digit monthly revenue.

[sarchertech]

Those would still be launching on places like product hunt though.

[copperx]

Haven't you? I have! In another reply, I noted the avalanche of WisprFlow competitors, as just one example.

[sarchertech]

95% of all new startups have the word AI in the description, so of course there are lots of new API wrappers and people trying to build off of existing models.

There aren’t noticeably more total startups or projects though.

[Bombthecat]

Huh? Less games launched on steam? First time I hear that. Any source?

But my guess would be: games are closed sourced and need physics. Which AI is bad at.

[sarchertech]

Just google “games released on steam by year”.

Many games don’t need physics, and there are a billion hobby projects on GitHub.

[Bombthecat]

https://steamdb.info/stats/releases/

Does not look like less games.

[sarchertech]

Sorry, I swapped the numbers. It's actually 1447 this year vs 1413 last year so 34 more games this year. So essentially now growth. Despite there being a clearly accelerating growth trend since 2018.

[echelon]

No. They're firing high paid seniors and replacing them with low pay juniors. This is IBM we're talking about.

The "limits of AI" bit is just smokescreen.

Firing seniors:

> Just a week after his comments, however, IBM announced it would cut thousands of workers by the end of the year as it shifts focus to high-growth software and AI areas. A company spokesperson told Fortune at the time that the round of layoffs would impact a relatively low single-digit percentage of the company’s global workforce, and when combined with new hiring, would leave IBM’s U.S. headcount roughly flat.

New workers will use AI:

> While she admitted that many of the responsibilities that previously defined entry-level jobs can now be automated, IBM has since rewritten its roles across sectors to account for AI fluency. For example, software engineers will spend less time on routine coding—and more on interacting with customers, and HR staffers will work more on intervening with chatbots, rather than having to answer every question.

[slopinthebag]

Where does it say those cuts were senior software developers?

Obviously they want new workers to use AI but I don't really see anything to suggest they're so successful with AI that they're firing all their seniors and hiring juniors to be meatbags for LLMs.

[xp84]

This just doesn't make any sense. Juniors + AI just does not equal seniors, except for prototyping greenfield projects. Who knows about 2 months from now, it moves fast and stuff, but not right now.

[robocat]

> just doesn't make any sense

I suspect the gap is that you don't know enough about IBM's business model.

When something doesn't make sense, a very common cause is a lack of context: many things can be extremely sensible for a business to do; things which appear insane from an outsider's point of view.

[fragmede]

probably aren't going to find a lot of articles discussing how water is wet, either.

[slopinthebag]

LOL great example. There are tons of articles on this topic:

https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/is-water-wet https://centreforinquiry.ca/keiths-conundrums-is-water-wet https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-17... http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=6097 https://parknotes.substack.com/p/is-water-wet-or-does-it-jus...

...etc. Turns out, it's not a solved question!

[bawolff]

Meh, i think a lot of companies just wanted an excuse to do lay-offs without the bad press, and AI was convinent.

[shusaku]

“AI will steal your job” never made sense. If your company is doing bad, sure maybe you fire people after automating their job. But we’re in a growth oriented economic system. If the company is doing good, and AI increases productivity, you actually will hire more people because every person is that much more of a return on investment

[throwaway613746]

> "if you're so much more productive with AI, what have you built with it"

If my boss asked me a question like this my reply would be "exactly what you told me to build, check jira".

If you want to know if I'm more productive - look at the metrics. Isn't that what you pay Atlassian for? Maybe you could ask their AI...

[bluGill]

As a senior engineer sometimes the system shows I did nothing because I was helping others. sometimes I get the really hard problem -'the isn't speller teh' type bugs are more common than thread race conditions - but a lot faster to solve.

[benreesman]

No one has built business AI that is flat correct to the standards of a high redundancy human organization.

Individuals make mistakes in air traffic control towers, but as a cumulative outcome it's a scandal if airplanes collide midair. Even in contested airspace.

The current infrastructure never gets there. There is no improvement path from MCP to air traffic control.

It's hard work and patience and math.