Hacker News Reader

Comment by simianwords | Hacker News Reader

As expected the thread is filled with smug comments on how it is definitely not ROI positive.

The thing I think about is AI is already at that spot where you don’t need a survey or a Randomised Controlled Trial to prove it makes one productive. Sometimes things are that obvious. But these kind of tests and surveys appeal to a certain kind of person who considers IMO the wrong type of things as rigorous.

View on HN

It makes organizations more productive at producing code and doing other tasks, but translating that into something that affects PnL is different. Where I work it's sped up individual tasks I've worked on but I don't think it's sped up delivery timelines of any of the major projects I'm involved in. We just added additional verification work with the extra cycles the engineers have now. It's not like that work is useless. It will probably mean I have less debugging to do in the future, but when you look at how the business makes money I don't see it making a big impact.

Based on what you said, would you think firms would dial down AI use in the coming years? If not it stands to reason that it did have big impact.

I think it is easy for companies to waste time and money on lots of things when it is hard to measure the impact. For example, I think most people would agree that the big tech companies are bloated and have too many employees for the amount of work they have. There's not really an incentive to fix problems, and in some cases (like with headcount) there are counter-incentives (managers want to have more reports).

I think companies will get better at measuring the impact of AI and attributing it to increasing profit or decreasing costs, and that the companies that are better at this will have an advantage over those that are worse, so eventually overall efficiency will improve.

Who’s paying you? In every thread you come off as so desperate

Are you the desperate green account who’s been replying to all my posts here. Get a grip.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com