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Comment by amatheus | Hacker News Reader

From an economic perspective productivity is defined as the creation of value isn't it? Then if you "improve productivity" and does not create value in the end you're no improving productivity at all.

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It does depend on how you define productivity. But the way it's commonly used is "I'm going faster, personally, with these tools."

The thing people I think have a hard time seeing is that "I go faster" does not mean "more features get finished".

It's a scale issue, and one scale is better than the other. People only pay for finished features, they do not pay for how much code you emit.

economists define productivity as gdp per hour worked. Like a lot of other economic measurements, its mostly a bogus number people use as an argument on why their politics are better than someone elses politics. You can have an efficient business located in a poor country making the same product and same quality as that same business in a rich country, the rich country will be more "productive" because local cost of goods is higher there (i.e. a restaurant in NYC is more "productive" than a restaurant in bangladesh).

Sure. But that's not, in my view, how most people use the word productivity when describing LLM use.

In my field - operations - productivity is usually described as some rate of production for a specific asset. 100 widgets / machine / hour - for example.

"My productivity is 3 PRs / day with the LLM as opposed to 1 PR per every three days". That's how I think people are thinking about it.

My point is that's not the same thing as value. I.e. what people will pay for.

You're correct, I just wanted to add that there is another definition that you may see used online, and it is very specific, and it's important to be aware it's NOT exactly the same thing most normal people mean when they say "productivity".

I appreciate you looking out. Thank you.

I’ve noticed more gold-plating.

“This random part of the code is slow, I used an LLM to generate a PR that speeds it up.”

Okay, you optimized the part that’s not a bottleneck, sped up nothing and cost the company $100 in tokens. Good job?

I'm quite fond of this play on "if a tree falls in the woods":

"If an LLM builds a feature, and no one uses it, did it make value?"

Productivity is defined revenue per worker hour. And we know worker hours are going down as there are fewer workers with the layoffs.

Which is why modern management thinks firing everyone in your factory and selling the inventory in your warehouse is amazingly productive.

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