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Comment by thiht | Hacker News Reader

> While engineers report being dramatically more productive with AI

Where are these people in real life? A few influencers or wannabes say that on Twitter or LinkedIn, but do you know actual people in real life who say they’re "dramatically more productive with AI"?

Everyone I know or talked to about AI has been very critical and rational, and has roughly the same opinion: AIs for coding (Copilot, Cursor, etc.) are useful, but not that much. They’re mostly convenient for some parts of what constitutes coding.

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I'm one of them. I've been coding for 22 years and now I use copilot all day every day. It gets stuff wrong, but I only ask it things I expect it to do well at, and I find it easy ignore or verify the bad answers.

I've never used electron and I got a small electron project up and running considerably faster than I would have otherwise.

I did some consulting for a project written in Vue and I know React, I got a good summary of the differences in the concepts, how to layout and structure files, etc. I had to modify a PHP project that was hosting Vue and I used chatgpt to find out where to look in the project to point to where I needed to look in the code to make the changes in the code. Just this morning I needed to use git bisect but I couldnt remember the exact syntax, I could have googled it and gone through the verbose documentation, the stackoverflow reply, or a long blog post. Instead, I got exactly what I needed back in seconds. I had to develop a migration plan for another project, I already had a rough idea of what to do, but I asked chatgpt anyway because why not, it takes seconds. It came up with what I had thought of already, some things I didn't need, and some things I hadn't thought of.

That reads to me as "slightly more productive", not "dramatically more productive"

I didn't realise we were being that pedantic about the phrasing. I had 3 months to evaluate a project, it took 1 month, I got asked to create a technical document for a migration in 2 weeks, it took 1 week. I wrote a prototype in a framework i didnt know and did it in less time than I could in a framework I know well without AI.

I've always been a backend developer, but started my own company about a year ago. From that, I had to become full stack and AI has helped dramatically with the learning and implementation. There's a lot of things which would have simply just taken far longer to understand or fix with just stackoverflow/google.

And that's just on the coding side, even more on the actual start up side!

Oh, I know of a handful of people that report this.

The quality of their work has gone down dramatically since they started being "faster", and it needs rewriting way more often than before LLMs existed. But they do claim they are now much faster.

Not sure how you gleaned that it was lower quality from my post?

You can move fast and still do things well if you set it up correctly at the start. Specifically with things like automated testing and so on.

> Not sure how you gleaned that it was lower quality from my post?

I dunno. I responded to a post that had a clear question. Either my reply is on the wrong post, or the text changed.

I do freelance/custom dev work. I continue to bid projects as if AI didn't exist. Recently (particularly since Cursor came onto the scene) I'm finding I finish projects 50-60% faster than my estimates.

It has been utterly game-changing and time-saving. I question each new bid I do: Should I assume AI will continue to help this much, and adjust my pricing?

Yeah, it's pretty decent when you're doing the nuts and bolts scaffolding part of coding.

Something like creating an ORM database table class, where all the fields are predictable and it's just a matter of writing out the right fields in the right format.

It's also replaced the really stupid Stack Overflow queries, when Ruby and Python and Javascript have corrupted my brain and I can't remember whether it's bar.lower() or bar.lowercase() or bar.lcase() or lower(bar) or whatever.

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