Ask HN: Have you seen an impact of AI on speeding up development of products?

4 points·bko··3 comments

Have you seen an impact of AI on speeding up development of products you personally use?

While there's lots of discussion about individual productivity gains from AI tools, I'm specifically interested in seeing if this has translated into faster and more noticeable improvements in the actual products we use.

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I use AI a lot these days, and the funny thing is that it feels much faster, but looking back, new features seem to take roughly the same amount of time, and the number of bugs appears to be about equal. The main time-consuming issue seems to be finding the right balance between providing too little and too much information. Give the AI too little reference data, and it begins deleting what it thinks is unnecessary, or it simply starts overlooking things; give it too much, and it chokes. I do spend less time writing or copying and pasting boilerplate code, but in the end, double-checking and debugging AI-generated code tends to equal it out.

I have the same general sense: the days feel slightly more productive but I am not sure I am producing more on the scale of months.

One area where I am absolutely seeing gains is prototyping. AI is so good at getting the 80% you need for a demo but it has a hard time getting beyond that (for now, anyway).

I am curious if others have tips for scaling up AI tools to larger scopes (working with full codebases, architecture, moving the needle on deploying features, etc)

Cursor AI is having good tool to use for more productive usage

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