> This gap between perception and reality is striking: developers expected AI to speed them up by 24%, and even after experiencing the slowdown, they still believed AI had sped them up by 20%.
I wonder what could explain such large difference between estimation/experience vs reality, any ideas?
Maybe our brains are measuring mental effort and distorting our experience of time?
The "economic experts" and "ml experts" are in many cases effectively the same group-- companies pushing AI coding tools have a vested interest in people believing they're more useful than they are. Executives take this at face value and broadly promise major wins. Economic experts take this at face value and use this for their forecasts.
This propagates further, and now novices and casual individuals begin to believe in the hype. Eventually, as an experienced engineer it moves the "baseline" expectation much higher.
Unfortunately this is very difficult to capture empirically.