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by pydry 12 days ago
The productivity depends upon the requirements.

If slop is fine (and sometimes it is), the benefits are undeniable. If the dev was the kind that would have produced slop anyway - again, undeniable boost.

If the quality needs to be high I think it actually can slow you down, though.

1 comments

Agreed, but also to expand, if the dev is mediocre and ai-assisted coding is a skill, the productivity gains are 10x more mediocre code. Since code is a liability, this is not desirable. Hence, mediocre devs being more productive is an underestimated problem of the age of ai-assisted coding. I see this every day.

The result is a whole bunch of dysfunctional systems unnecessarily dislodging perfectly acceptable processes.

"Code is a liability" is the part that usually gets hand-waved, and there's a number on it now. Veracode's 2025 GenAI report ran 80 tasks across 100+ models: when a task could be solved securely or insecurely, the models picked the insecure path 45% of the time, at roughly 2.7x the vulnerability density of human-written code (Java was worst, at a 72% failure rate).

So the mediocre-dev case may be worse than "10x more mediocre code." It's more code that also skews insecure by default, and that cost shows up downstream in review and incidents, not at the PR. Throughput goes up, and so does the liability per line.