Eh accuracy and reliability is a different topic hashed out many times on HN. This thread is about productivity. I’m a staff engineer and I don’t know a single person not using AI. My senior engineers are estimating 40% gains in productivity.
Accuracy and reliability are necessary to know real productivity. If you have produced code that doesn't work right, you haven't "produced" anything (except in the economic sense of managing to get someone to pay for it).
For example, if you produce 5x more code at 5% reliability, the net result is a -75% change in productivity (ignoring the overhead costs of detecting said reliability).
It’s only slop of you don’t understand the code, prompt, and result, and skip code reviews. You can have large productivity gains without reducing quality standards.
So essentially like delegating all work to a beginner programmer only 10x more frustrating? Well, that's not what I would classify under "Pocket PhD" or "Nation of PhDs in a datacenter", which is the bullshit propaganda the AI CEOs are relentlessly pushing. We should not have to figure this out for them - they were saying this will write ALL code in 6 months from "now", the last time "now" being January 2026, so in little over 4.5 months. No, we should not be fixing this mess, f*k understanding the prompts and doing the code reviews of the AI slop. Why does it not work as advertised?
I’m just saying the productivity gains are real, even in serious production level and life critical systems.
If you are only able to think in binaries, no-AI or phd-AI, that’s a you problem.
Again, neither serious studies (See that METR study on dev productivity), nor the ever increasing rate of major incidents caused by AI support your statement. Not to mention the absolute lack of well known AI-produced products that we know of.
> If you are only able to think in binaries, no-AI or phd-AI, that’s a you problem.
No, you see if I were a CEO of a public ompany and I lied through my teeth to the investors and the general public, about the capabilities of my product, then I would normally go to jail. The CEOs of major AI companies are making claims that do not seem to be confirmed in reality. They have burned several hundred billion dollars so far, in pursuit of "god-level intelligence". What came out instead is "your prompting sucks" or similar level of nonsense.
I am only holding them to the standards they have repeatedly, boldly and insistently set themselves. You should be too.