[android521]

"even fairly nontechnical people and solo founders told us they were spending more than half of their development time reading the AI-written code.." ~ Is this even true? I haven't read code for at least 6 months and I have many who are in the same boat.

[Darmani]

In fairness, I did most of these interviews last summer, and I know some people have changed. And while I did go a fair bit outside my network to interview people, there are all sorts of hard-to-understand selection effects that come from me being me. A 21 year-old frat boy who tried doing the same kind of interviewing with the people he could find to interview would probably get different results.

But yes, that is indeed what happened. Multiple times, I'd talk to someone that I'd expect to not be reading the code at all (solo founder, mostly nontechnical), then I'd interview him in detail about his workflow and think "Huh, there was absolutely no point in there where he was reading stuff," and then I'd ask "So how much of your time is reading code?" "60, maybe 70%"