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Measuring the impact of AI on experienced open-source developer productivity

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688 points dheerajvs | 2 comments | 10 Jul 25 16:29 UTC | HN request time: 0.451s | source
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noisy_boy ◴[10 Jul 25 17:04 UTC] No.44523098[source]▶
It is 80/20 again - it gets you 80% of the way in 20% of the time and then you spend 80% of the time to get the rest of the 20% done. And since it always feels like it is almost there, sunk-cost fallacy comes into play as well and you just don't want to give up.

I think an approach that I tried recently is to use it as a friction remover instead of a solution provider. I do the programming but use it to remove pebbles such as that small bit of syntax I forgot, basically to keep up the velocity. However, I don't look at the wholesale code it offers. I think keeping the active thinking cap on results in code I actually understand while avoiding skill atrophy.

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emodendroket ◴[10 Jul 25 17:17 UTC] No.44523227[source]▶
I think it’s most useful when you basically need Stack Overflow on steroids: I basically know what I want to do but I’m not sure how to achieve it using this environment. It can also be helpful for debugging and rubber ducking generally.
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skydhash ◴[10 Jul 25 17:46 UTC] No.44523560[source]▶
The issue is that it is slow and verbose, at least in its default configuration. The amount of reading is non trivial. There’s a reason most references are dense.
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emodendroket ◴[11 Jul 25 00:18 UTC] No.44527160[source]▶
Well, compared to what method that would be faster to answer that kind of question?
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1. skydhash ◴[11 Jul 25 10:19 UTC] No.44530471[source]▶
Learning the thing. It’s not like I have to use all the libraries of the whole world at the job. You can really fly over a reference documentation if you’re familiar with the domain.
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2. emodendroket ◴[11 Jul 25 15:30 UTC] No.44533299[source]▶
If your job only ever calls on you to use the same handful of libraries of course just becoming deeply familiar is better but that’s obviously not realistic if you’re jumping from this thing to that thing. Nobody would use resources like Stack Overflow either if it were that easy and practical to just “learn the thing.”