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Comment by quinnjh | Hacker News Reader

The market seems excited to charge in whatever direction the weathervane has last been pointing, regardless of the real outcomes of running in that direction. Hopefully I’m wrong, but it reminds me very much of this study (I’ll quote a paraphrase)

“A groundbreaking new study of over 1,000 scientists at a major U.S. materials science firm reveals a disturbing paradox: When paired with AI systems, top researchers become extraordinarily more productive – and extraordinarily less satisfied with their work. The numbers tell a stark story: AI assistance helped scientists discover 44% more materials and increased patent filings by 39%. But here's the twist: 82% of these same scientists reported feeling less fulfilled in their jobs.”

Quote from https://futureofbeinghuman.com/p/is-ai-poised-to-suck-the-so...

Referencing this study https://aidantr.github.io/files/AI_innovation.pdf

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As a dev, I have the same experience.

AI chat is a massive productivity enhancer, but, when coding via prompts, I'm not able to hit the super satisfying developer flow state that I get into via normal coding.

Copilot is less of a productivity boost, but also less of a flow state blocker.

Yep! I think these tools are incredibly useful, but I think they're basically changing all our jobs to be more like what product managers do, having ideas for what we want to achieve, but farming out a significant chunk of the work rather than doing it ourselves. And that's fine, I find it very hard to argue that it's a bad thing. But there's a reason that we aren't all product managers already. Programming is fun, and I do experience it as a loss to find myself doing less of it myself.

There is some queasy feeling of fake-ness when auto-completing so much code. It feels like you're doing something wrong. But these are all based on my experience coding for half my life. AI-native devs will probably feel differently.

Maybe they should build in a test/reward system somehow to make it more appealing to use by humans. Gamification is the corporate buzzword I think

I'm a bit skeptical of this study given how it is unpublished, from a (fairly junior) single author and all of the underlying details of the subject are redacted. Is there any information anywhere about what this company in the study was actually doing? (the description in the article are very vague -- basically something to do with materials)

Definitely interesting, but I'm not so sure that such a study can yet make strong claims about AI-based work in general.

These are scientists that have cultivated a particular workflow/work habits over years, even decades. To a significant extent, I'm sure their workflow is shaped by what they find fulfilling.

That they report less fulfillment when tasked with working under a new methodology, especially one that they feel little to no mastery over, is not terribly surprising.

The feeling of dissatisfaction is something I can relate to. My story:

I only recently started using aider[1].

My experience with it can be described in 3 words.

Wow!

Oh wow!

It was amazing. I was writing a throwaway script for one time use (not for work). It wrote it for me in under 15 minutes (this includes my time getting familiar with the tool!) No bugs.

So I decided to see how far I could take it. I added command line arguments, logging, and a whole bunch of other things. After a full hour, I had a production ready script - complete with logs, etc. I had to debug code only once.

I may write high quality code for work, but for personal throwaway scripts, I'm sloppy. I would not put a command line parser, nor any logging. This did it all for me for very cheap!

There's no going back. For simple scripts like this, I will definitely use aider.

And yeah, there was definitely no satisfaction one would derive from coding. It was truly addictive. I want to use it more and more. And no matter how much I use it and like the results, it doesn't scratch my programmer's itch. It's nowhere near the fun/satisfaction of SW development.

[1] https://aider.chat/

I tried Aider recently to modify a quite small python + HTML project, and it consistently got "uv" commands wrong, ended up changing my entire build system because it didn't think the thing I wanted to do was supported in the current one (it was).

They're very effective at making changes for the most part, but boy you need to keep them on a leash if you care about what those changes are.

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