[ZaoLahma]

> There seems to be a strong bias where using AI feels like you're making a lot of progress very quickly, but compared to manual coding it often seems to be significantly slower in practice.

This metric highly depends on who uses the AI to do what, where strong emphasis is on "who" and "what".

In my line of work (software developer) the biggest time sinks are meetings where people need to align proposed solutions with the expectations of stakeholders. From that aspect AI won't help much, or at all, so measuring the difference of man hours spent from solution proposal to when it ends up in the test loops with and without AI would yield... very disappointing results.

But for troubleshooting and fixing bugs, or actually implementing solutions once they have been approved? For me, I'm at least 10x'ing myself compared to before I was using AI. Not only in pure time, but also in my ability to reason around observed behaviors and investigating what those observations mean when troubleshooting.

But I also work with people who simply cannot make the AI produce valuable (correct) results. I think if you know exactly what you want and how you want it, AI is a great help. You just tell it to do what you would have done anyway, and it does it quicker than you could. But if you don't know exactly what you want, AI will be outright harmful to your progress.

[zzzeek]

the venn diagram of people who say "AI produces useless results I have to 100% throw away" and people who say "I've never successfully delegated parts of large software development to junior programmers" is a circle

[20k]

Junior programmers learn and provide a wide value, AI does not

[zzzeek]

I get a lot more done with lot less frustration giving my work to Claude than to a junior dev quite frankly and I've managed many groups over my career.

the value of the junior dev is the hopes that they'd be a senior dev someday, I dont have a solution to that problem. But in my current capacity where the only devs I'm "managing" these days are via open source contributions, they're already gone - 100% of what I get is through their own work with LLMs (which I have to spend more time correcting than if I used the LLM myself).