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119 points lsharkey602 | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.235s | source
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reedf1 ◴[] No.44423223[source]
I think it is possible that the widespread introduction of ChatGPT will cause a brief hiatus on hiring due to the inelasticity of demand. For the sake of argument, imagine that ChatGPT makes your average developer 4x more productive. It will take a while before the expectation becomes that 4x more work is delivered. That 4x more work is scheduled in sprints. That 4x more features are developed. That 4x more projects are sold to clients/users. When the demand eventually catches up (if it exists), the hiring will begin again.
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TSiege ◴[] No.44423440[source]
I am not asking this as a gotcha, but a genuine curiosity for you or other people who find AI is helping them in terms of multiples. What is your workflow like? Where do you lean on AI vs not? Is it agentic stuff is tab by cursor?

I find AI helpful but no where near a multiplier in my day to day development experience. Converting a csv to json or vis-versa great, but AI writing code for me has been less helpful. Beyond boiler plate, it introduces subtle bugs that are a pain in the ass to deal with. For complicated things, it struggles and does too much and because I didn't write it I don't know where the bad spots are. And AI code review often gets hung up on nits and misses real mistakes.

So what are you doing and what are the resources you'd recommend?

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reedf1 ◴[] No.44423484[source]
4x is a number I pulled out of thin air. I'm not sure I even yet believe there is a net positive effect of using AI on productivity. What I am sure about in my own workflow is that is saves me time writing boilerplate code - it is good at this for me. So I would say it has saved me time in the short-term. Now does not writing this boilerplate slow me down long-term? It's possible, I could forget how to do this myself, some part of my brain could atrophy (as the MIT study suggests). How it affects large teams, systems and the transfer of knowledge is also not clear.
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1. eru ◴[] No.44423716[source]
I wouldn't be too worried about the atrophy. Or at least not much more than you already were: you get the same atrophy effect just from IDEs and compiler errors and warnings.

To give a concrete example: I'm pretty good at doing Python coding on a whiteboard, because that's what I practiced for job interviews, and when I first learned Python I used Vim without setting up any Python integration.

I'm pretty terrible at doing Rust on a whiteboard, because I only learned it when I had a decent IDE and later even AI support.

Nevertheless, I don't think I'm a better programmer in Python.