Posted by arjunbanker 1 day ago
I’ve found also AI assisted stuff is remarkable for algorithmically complex things to implement.
However one thing I definitely identify with is the trouble sleeping. I am finally able to do a plethora of things I couldn’t do before due to the limits of one man typing. But I don’t build tools I don’t need, I have too little time and too many needs.
AI is really good to rubber duck through a problem.
The LLM has heard of everything… but learned nothing. It also doesn't really care about your problem.
So, you can definitely learn from it. But the moment it creates something you don't understand, you've lost control.
You had one job.
I have the exact same experience... if you don't use it, you'll lose it
That's most code when you're still working on it, no?
> Also, multiple agents can run at once, which is a workflow for many developers. The work essentially doesn't come to a pausing point.
Yeah the agent swarm approach sounds unsurvivably stressful to me lol
It’s not. It’s either 33% slower than perceived or perception overestimates speed by 50%. I don’t know how to trust the author if stuff like this is wrong.
She's not wrong.
A good way to do this calculation is with the log-ratio, a centered measure of proportional difference. It's symmetric, and widely used in economics and statistics for exactly this reason. I.e:
ln(1.2/0.81) = ln(1.2)-ln(0.81) ≈ 0.393
That's nearly 40%, as the post says.
It’s more obvious if you take more extreme numbers, say: they estimated to take 99% less time with AI, but it took 99% more time - the difference is not 198%, but 19900%. Suddenly you’re off by two orders of magnitude.
idk what ya'll are doing with AI, and i dont really care. i can finally - fiiinally - stay focused on the problem im trying to solve for more than 5 minutes.
Like I don’t remember syntax or linting or typos being a problem since I was in high school doing Turbo Pascal or Visual Basic.
Fortunately, I've retired so I'm going focus on flooding the zone with my crazy ideas made manifest in books.
Note: the study used sonnet-3.5 and sonnet-3.7; there weren’t any agents, deep research or similar tools available. I’d like to see this study done again with:
1. juniors ans mid-level engineers
2. opus-4.6 high and codex-5.2 xhigh
3. Tasks that require upfront research
4. Tasks that require stakeholder communication, which can be facilitated by AI
Which frankly describes pretty much all real world commercial software projects I've been on, too.
Software engineering hasn't happened yet. Agents produce big balls of mud because we do, too.
Maybe they need to start handing out copies of the mythical man month again because people seem to be oblivious to insights we already had a few decades ago