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Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

This study was shown to be flawed at the time; METR has retracted it. And it doesn't take into account current frontier models.

AI makes you more productive. This is no longer up for debate. The energy you spend arguing last year's talking points is better spent knuckling down and learning the tools.

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Have they retracted it? My understanding was simply that they released results with more recent data, not that this study itself was flawed (and their website doesn't mention a retraction either)

What tools? The ones that will be outmoded in 6 months, or the ones that will be banned in 6 months?

Whatever tools come along, step one is getting into the mindset that typing code in is no longer part of your job. You are a designer and director, not a coder. As Steve Yegge says, if you still have an IDE open entering code by hand, you're one of the crappy engineers. You need to be getting into the habit of understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your model and agentic harness and using those to produce the results you want. When those change in six months, you adapt along with them. Adjusting to the new mindset is the biggest hurdle, and there'll be plenty of devs who can't, and won't make the cut or stay in the field for very long. Just like there were plenty of devs who couldn't adjust to anything beyond COBOL on punched cards.

So where are the profit jumps from all the productivity gains?

Or do you just produce more code but not more productive value?

Partial agree ...

I suspect:

If you know what you are doing it is a power tool.

If you don't know what you are doing it's also a power tool - if you measure a lot of devs then the bad ones (or anyone having a bad day, or the wrong fit for a project) can make work for everyone else at an outrageous pace.

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