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Comment by AstroBen | Hacker News Reader

Why is it an all or nothing decision?

Do a small test: if you're 10x faster then keep going. If not, shelve it for a while and maybe try again later

It's not possible to tell if you're 10x faster, or even faster at all, over any non-trivial amount of time. When not using a coding agent, you make different decisions and get the task done differently, at a different level of architecture, with a different understanding of the code.

You don't think it's possible you'd notice if you, or the people around you, produced 6 months of work in 3 weeks?

The case where it's not obvious is when the effect is <1.5x. I think that's clearly where we're at

I think it's a lot harder than it sounds. First, nobody can estimate time well enough to know how long something would have taken without AI. And then, it's comparing apples to oranges - there's the set of things people did using an AI agent, and the set of things they would have done if they hadn't used AI, and the two are just not directly comparable. The AI agent set would definitely have more lines of code, that's all I could really say. Maybe it would also contain a larger maintenance burden, lower useful knowledge in humans, projects that didn't need to be done or could have been done in a smarter way, etc.

This sounds like lowering expectations with extra steps!

It is an all or nothing decision. We were letting devs make a decision about AI use and it turned out just a few were using it. The rest were using it just a little. But we noticed people were still spending time on stuff that AI can easily do for them!! I know because I had to do stuff for devs who were just not able to do things quickly enough and I did it with AI in minutes. Quite disappointing. But my conclusion is that we need to push AI quite strongly and invest in the best services otherwise people don’t even try it, and when they do it if it’s some cheap service they quickly dismiss it. So here we are.

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