Sounds about right.

I’d like to see numbers for inexperienced devs and devs working on somebody else’s code, though.

EDIT: Oh, this is interesting. The full paper breaks down where the time goes. Turns out coders do in fact spend less time actually working on the code when using AI, but the time spent prompting, waiting on the output and processing the output eats up the difference. They also sit idle for longer with AI. So their forecasts aren’t that crazy, they do work less/faster with AI, but the new extra tasks make them less productive overall.

That makes a lot of sense in retrospect, but it’s not what I was expecting.

Make sure we read table 2 in the paper. The reality is the people behind this study is urging folks to not draw strong conclusions from this study.

This tracks pretty much with my conclusions for myself, neat.

It’s crazy, I’m fooled every time again and think “surely I must be faster like this” when after a few days an in-depth reflection/looking at actual commits shows that nope, I wasn’t.

One area that it really helps for me is executive function. There’s a lot of things that I’m capable of doing, even quickly, but I’ve got this mental block that just makes me not want to do it. But if I can just write out some instructions and have a system do the rest, it’s much easier to get going.

I’ll still think through the problem and approach using AI to help coding at a “I need a function that will take this data in this format and do x, y, z to it and return that data in that format” level rather than something like a higher level description of my final goal.

Is it faster than what I could do if I focused on programming and get on a good roll? I dunno, it might still be. Is it faster than me actually trying to program something in the reality that I often exist in? Fuck yeah.

And even debugging and testing go way smoother. For one thing, I don’t have to deal with stupid typo bugs anymore. And for the bugs that still make it in, AI has been great at taking an idea of how to examine the data that would be a pain to implement and just doing it for me, especially if it involves some obscure API or language features since I don’t have to spend time finding its existence and then learning it (if it’s a one off, I won’t likely retain anything other than the existence part, which I can still get from looking at the AI generated code).

So it’s pretty great for programmers who know their shit but ADHD gets in the way of using it in a timely manner. It’s better than an intern, which is good for me but sucks for those who need to learn. There’s a good chance AI’s semi-competence if hand held by an expert is going to lead to a big lack of talent as those experts age out. Though with how quickly it’s improving, it might not even need the hand holding by then. I’m not sure which possibility is scarier.

Not a developer, but I do a lot of scripting. I recently needed a yaml file with a whole set of parameters from an excel file for about 600 objects. Copilot generated it for me in about a minute. It took some iterations but it saved me a fuckton of time. Anyway, my point is you need to pick your battles. It’s a tool, so wield it like one.