> human employees using AI are doing way more than they could before, both in depth and scale
Funny how that doesn't show up in any productivity or economic metrics...
Funny how that doesn't show up in any productivity or economic metrics...
That said, I expect you are right that we won't see it show up. Even if we assume the claim is true in every way for some people, it only works for exceptional visionaries who were previously constrained by typing speed, which is a very, very, very small segment of the developer population. Any gains that small group realize will be an unrecognizable blip amid everything else. The vast majority of developers need all that typing time and more to have someone come up with their next steps. Reducing the typing time for them doesn't make them any more productive. They were never limited by typing speed in the first place.
When including re-work of bugs in the AI generated code some studies find that AI has no positive impact on software developer productivity, and can even have a negative impact.
The main problem with these studies are they are backward looking, so frontier labs can always claim the next model will be the one that delivers the promised productivity gains and displace human workers.
Which studies are you talking about? The last major study that I saw (that gained a lot of attention) was published half a year ago, and the study itself was conducted on developers using AI tools in 2024.
The technology has improved so rapidly that this study is now close-to-meaningless.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OzxYK2-qsI [2] https://www.coderabbit.ai/blog/state-of-ai-vs-human-code-gen... [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvosMkuNxF8 [4] https://www.faros.ai/blog/ai-software-engineering
"The technology has improved so rapidly that this study is now close-to-meaningless."
You could have said that anytime in the last 3 years, but the data has never shown it to be true. Is there data to show that the current gen models are so much better than the last gen models that the existing productivity data should be ignored? I don't think the coding benchmarks show a step change in capabilities, its generally dev vibes rather than a large change to measurements.
On the other hand, people are working much harder today than 3 years ago (remember people not showing up to work and posting on TikTok about how little work did collecting paychecks from 2 different companies etc?)
Just saying it's very hard to look at a time series and determine an effect size, even though politicians/CEOs like to claim ownership for growths.