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Comment by Terr_ | Hacker News Reader

> McKinsey stated AI could “automate work activities that absorb 60 to 70 percent of employees’ time today” across all occupations, not specifically software development.

I would wager a large portion of that would be both generating and then triaging a certain level of institutional "bullshit communications".

For example, the employee must give daily status updates, and they have a three-item list for the day. They use an LLM to pad out their three-item bullet list into prose that sounds smart and active and impressive.

Then their manager says "TLDR" and uses an LLM to "summarize" it back into almost the original three-item bullet list. Each employee believes they've "saved time" using the tool, but it's a kind of broken-window fallacy [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

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LLM biggest productivity boost might uncovering that most of the work we do is B.S. anyway and mostly made up of pushing papers around.

Haha, in my workplace, I feel it's making me come up with BS. I do use it occasionally in my job, and it can be helpful. But there's a very strong push from my C-suite to make everyone in the company use more AI. Doesn't really matter how, we're just supposed to be rubbing AI on stuff. So a few times a day I boop our AI tools and find excuses to mention to my boss that I did an AI thing.

I'm telling people that if AI can make the process easy or go away, maybe it's time to rethink we need the process.

Without a definition of thought as work, the entire argument of AI productivity is noise. The value of AI to work is utterly unquantifiable.

But command of human attention is another matter: it can be quantified and it is command of attention that defines the value of FAANG+

The AI boosters hype it in such terms, both intra-model and extra-model: we track the attention and sell seats in the musical chairs of "investment", leaving it to users to explain the productivity gains to themselves.

It's a circus.

I always find the X% of developers use AI tools for their work suspect because I know many people who are being pressured by their company to adopt AI tools for their day to day workflows.

As they should be. It’s a necessary tool to learn. If your entire dev team circa 2010 was writing code in notepad++ and sharing code versions in a zip file, you would push them to use an IDE and source control. It’s the same concept.

That's true insofar as there is friction to adoption.

But whether $THING should be adopted and whether it does increase long-term productivity is nowhere near as clear-cut.

Have you used it? It should be, and does.

Did you read the article? It cites the METR study[1] which showed that while people using AI tools to program report feeling like they are producing more, they are in fact producing about 20% less than without the tools.

Ironically you could get the same effect and save compute fees by simply having programmers stay home one day a week.

[1] https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...

Did you read the article?

> We do not provide evidence that: AI systems do not currently speed up many or most software developers

Correct, it only shows that AI slows down experienced developers, which is who the thread is about.

That study is straight out of the school that measures productivity in kLOC. Completely worthless except as fuel for Internet arguments and poorly-informed policymaking.

OK, should be easy to find a better study then, right?

Not my job. Ask your friendly neighborhood LLM, maybe.

If I wanted advice from someone who was confidently wrong I would talk to a project manager

Zing

Why should it be necessary to adopt a tool that reduces your productivity by 20%?

Please provide supporting evidence of this wild claim.

I suggest checking the HN submission before giving up.

> Most alarmingly, the METR study found experienced developers took 19% longer with AI tools, despite believing they’d sped up by 20%.

Did you read the article?

> We do not provide evidence that: AI systems do not currently speed up many or most software developers

> many or most

You act like that's a "gotcha" instead of a normal thing. All they mean by that [0] is that can't mathematically prove their developers/tasks/tool are representative for of the majority of worldwide developers/tasks/tools.

You're demanding an unreasonable level of investment for anyone to "prove a negative."

The burden of proof lies on the people claiming zillion-fold boosts in productivity across "enough" places that they don't really define. This is especially true because they could profit in the process, as opposed to other people burning money to prove a point.

[0] https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...

Literally in the article posted

If you want to shit talk LLMs, you better come armed with research, buddy. Claims about how it will revolutionise every profession just need n=1 anecdata though.

Historical comparison: "I just had a pizza delivered on the new Segway and it was super duper cool because they came right into the conference center, so say goodbye to cars and bikes, by 2025 it's all going to be Personal People Movers!"

That said, I think LLMs will have a bigger effect than a self-balancing scooter, both positively and negatively.

Did you read the article?

> We do not provide evidence that: AI systems do not currently speed up many or most software developers

Correct, the study showed that it slows down experienced developers. We don't know what it does to inexperienced developers so that sounds like a good research topic. But it still leads to the question of why experienced developers should be told to adopt it, given that it slows them down.

Yeah that's an outright fraudulent claim.

But most fraud is legal, and most illegal fraud never sees legal action taken against it.

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