[QuadrupleA]

> everybody who is like me, fully onboarded into AI and agentic tools, seemingly has less and less time available because we fall into a trap where we’re immediately filling it with more things

I do wonder if productivity with AI coding has really gone up, or if it just gives the illusion of that, and we take on more projects and burn ourselves out?

[ghurtado]

> I do wonder if productivity with AI coding has really gone up

Here's the thing: we never had a remotely sane way to measure productivity of a software engineer for reasons that we all understand, and we don't have it now.

Even if we had it, it's not the sort of thing that management would even use: they decide how productive you are based on completely unrelated criteria, like willingness to work long hours and keeping your mouth shut when you disagree.

If you ask those types whether productivity has gone up with AI, they'll probably say something like "of course, we were able to let go a third of our programmers and nothing really seems to have changed"

"Productivity" became a poisoned word the moment that the suits realized what a useful weapon it was, and that it was impossible to challenge.

[johnnyanmac]

>"Productivity" became a poisoned word the moment that the suits realized what a useful weapon it was, and that it was impossible to challenge.

Not impossible to challenge. But most people don't have the legal funds to do so. Those that do tend to get a cushy severance bribe to stay quiet and they move on elsewhere.

That's also why it's a long process to "fire" someone but easy to "lay off" instead. layoffs are never about productivity (so it doesn't matter anyway), and the US is doing absolutely nothing to protect against it like most of the world.

[ErroneousBosh]

> I do wonder if productivity with AI coding has really gone up, or if it just gives the illusion of that, and we take on more projects and burn ourselves out?

It definitely hasn't for me. I spent about an hour today trying to use AI to write something fairly simple and I'm still no further forward.

I don't understand what problem AI is supposed to solve in software development.

[ghurtado]

> I don't understand what problem AI is supposed to solve in software development.

When Russians invaded Germany during WWII, some of them (who had never seen a toilet) thought that toilets were advanced potato washing machines, and were rightfully pissed when their potatoes were flushed away and didn't come back.

Sounds like you're feeling a similar frustration with your problem.

[heavyset_go]

At some point hearing "you're holding it wrong" and "here's a metaphor for why you're dumb" in response to real shortcomings with AI, and the manic hype behind it, becomes repetitive and feels like there really aren't good arguments or evidence against those shortcomings and hype.

[lawn]

Russians invading Ukraine had some, let's say interesting, reactions to modernities like toilets and washing machines

[ghurtado]

Which begs the question: how many of those Russians stealing the appliances also took a potato washer or two?

[ErroneousBosh]

I don't really see where that comparison is relevant.

Why is AI supposed to be good?

[Philpax]

Apologies for the obligatory question, but what did you try to do, and with which AI did you try to do it with?

[ErroneousBosh]

Well following advice from folk on here earlier, I thought I'd start small and try to get it to write some code in Go that would listen on a network socket, wait for a packet with a bunch of messages (in a known format) come in, and split those messages out from the packet.

I ended up having to type hundreds of lines of description to get thousands of lines of code that doesn't actually work, when the one I wrote myself is about two dozen lines of code and works perfectly.

It just seems such a slow and inefficient way to work.

[timacles]

Hate to pull the skill issue card here, but that is a trivial problem that can be one shotted with almost any model with

[ErroneousBosh]

Okay, tell you what then. Help me learn.

The problem is that I want something that listens on a TCP connection for GD92 packets, and when they arrive send appropriate handshaking to the other end and parse them into Go structs that can be stuffed into a channel to be dealt with elsewhere.

And, of course, something to encode them and send them again.

How would I do that with whatever AI you choose?

I'm pretty certain you can't solve this with AI because there is literally no published example of code to do it that it can copy from.

[timacles]

GD92 packets?

No idea what you’re talking about but if it has a spec then it doesn’t matter if it’s trained on it. Break the problem down into small enough chunks. Give it examples of expected input and output then any llm can reason about it. Use a planning mode and keep the context small and focused on each segment of the process.

You’re describing a basic tcp exchange, learn more about the domain and how packets are structured and the problem will become easier by itself. Llms struggle with large code bases which pollute the context not straightforward apps like this

[smj-edison]

tbh that's not a helpful thing to say. I think a more productive thing would be to ask "What model are you using?" "Are you using it in chat mode or as a dedicated agent?" "Do you have an AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md?"

I've also been underwhelmed with its ability to iterate, as it tends to pile on hacks. So another useful question is "did you try having it write again with what you/it learned?"

[ErroneousBosh]

> I think a more productive thing would be to ask "What model are you using?" "Are you using it in chat mode or as a dedicated agent?" "Do you have an AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md?"

In my case I'd have to say "Don't know, whatever VS Code's bot uses", and "no idea what those are or why I have to care".

[timacles]

Agreed was a bit rough. Yes they are not great at iterating and keeping long contexts, but you look at what he’s describing and you have to agree that’s exactly the type of problem llm excel at

Shouldn’t have to baby step through the basics when the author is clearly not interested in learning himself

[agumonkey]

A blend of both. You do create more, but the goalposts are always one more step away.

ps: it's strange that YouTubers are talking about the same thing. People in different dev circles. Agentic feels like doom ide scroll.

[irishcoffee]

Sounds similar to a slot machine. How odd…

[timacles]

What society and America is about to realize is that it really doesn’t matter how productive you are at software and technological innovations when systemic things outside of the economic system are eroding.

It doesn’t matter how fast we can make our widgets and chatbots when what you need is to have a self sufficient workforce. We have outsourced everything material and valuable for society. Now we are left with industries of gambling, ad machines and pharmaceuticals with a government that is functionally bankrupt and politicians that have completely sold out