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Comment by emp17344 | Hacker News Reader

If there’s evidence of productivity improvements through AI use, please provide more information. From what I’ve seen, the actual data shows that AI use slows developers down.

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The sheer number of projects I've completed that I truly would never have been able to even make a dent in is evidence enough for me. I don't think research will convince you. You need to either watch someone do it, or experiment with it yourself. Get your hands dirty on an audacious project with Claude code.

Research is the only thing that will convince me. That’s the way it should be.

https://youtu.be/1OzxYK2-qsI a 6-12% increase in pull requests per developer per month.

It sounds like you're building a lot of prototypes or small projects, which yes LLMs can be amazingly helpful at. But that is very much not what many/most professional engineers spend their time on, and generalizing from that former case often doesn't hold up in my experience.

We use both Claude and Codex on a fairly large ~10-years old Java project (~1900 Java files, 180K lines of code). Both tools are able to implement changes across several files, refactor the code, add unit tests for the modified areas.

Sometime the result is not great, sometimes it requires manual updates, sometimes it just goes into a wrong direction and we just discard the proposal. The good thing is you can initiate such a large change, go get a coffee, and when you're back you can take a look at the changes.

Anyway, overall those tools are pretty useful already.

It sounds like you're assuming I'm not a professional engineer and I only work on prototypes.

They're basing it on what you described in your previous comment. I got the same impression.

Finishing projects makes me sound unprofessional?

I've been at it multiple decades. TC $1M+. Forever beginner I guess.

"sheer number" combined with "completed" sounds more like lots of small projects (likely hobbyist or prototypes) than it does anything large/complicated/ongoing like in a professional setting.

It is, at this point, rather suspect that there are mountains of anecdata, but pretty much no high quality quantitive data (and what there is is mixed at best). Fun fact; worldwide, over 200 million people use homeopathy on a regular basis. They think it works. It doesn't work.

I don't suppose anything will change your mind, but here you go.

https://youtu.be/1OzxYK2-qsI a 6-12% increase in pull requests per developer per month.

"But those diffs are AI slop and rework" you will object. Oh well, I tried.

> Fun fact; worldwide, over 200 million people use homeopathy on a regular basis. They think it works. It doesn't work.

Homeopathy works for sure. Placebo works. There are many studies confirming that.

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