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Comment by wewewedxfgdf | Hacker News Reader

My two bosses are anti-AI.

Whenever I tell them about how awesome AI is, they come back with stories about how they used AI and it couldn't even do anything basic and what it did do had errors.

People will always create a world narrative that matches what they already believe.

Anti AI people are always quoting these "facts" about how AI reduces productivity even when developers feel it increases productivity - it reinforces their world view.

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>feel

Productivity is not a feeling though. Either you show an increased productivity or it doesn't exist

Performance review at FAANGs has always been vibes and soft skills.

Shipped projects don't lie.

Come on, we all know that shipping a project doesn't mean the project was productive

When tens of millions are using your code in production it kind of is dude.

And? That's not the point of discussion

Problem is, all the old metrics are now obsolete and nobody knows how to measure productivity anymore.

It is however extremely hard to measure accurately with software engineering and every easy measurement immediately draws ire from devs here.

Yes and no. You can measure things:

* features delivered * time-to-market (idea -> production) * code quality metrics * bugs found / bugs fixed * tickets opened / closed (and with what resolution) / month * revenue vs expenses * (if you must) commits / month, code changes / month

But few software developers seem to do that because it's overhead.

But this isn’t just a narrative but a study. Limited but a study

A study from 2025. Might as well be from five years ago.

So where are all those profits from the higher productivity?

Having participated in many studies, I lost much faith in studies. You could study the same thing, and get opposite results depending on how you build the study, which people participate (friends and colleagues will be reluctant to speak against your results), and the bias with which you set everything up. Also, many tasks require learning the tools, and some tools will start to be more productive with expertise than others.

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