19
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2025
19 points (100.0% liked)
TechTakes
2085 readers
195 users here now
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Remember last week when that study on AI's impact on development speed dropped?
A lot of peeps take away on this little graphic was "see, impacts of AI on sw development are a net negative!" I think the real take away is that METR, the AI safety group running the study, is a motley collection of deeply unserious clowns pretending to do science and their experimental set up is garbage.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-168077291
"First, I don’t like calling this study an “RCT.” There is no control group! There are 16 people and they receive both treatments. We’re supposed to believe that the “treated units” here are the coding assignments. We’ll see in a second that this characterization isn’t so simple."
(I am once again shilling Ben Recht's substack. )
While I also fully expect the conclusion to check out, it's also worth acknowledging that the actual goal for these systems isn't to supplement skilled developers who can operate effectively without them, it's to replace those developers either with the LLM tools themselves or with cheaper and worse developers who rely on the LLM tools more.
True. They aren't building city sized data centers and offering people 9 figure salaries for no reason. They are trying to front load the cost of paying for labour for the rest of time.