487
this (thelemmy.club)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/fuck_ai@lemmy.world
42 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

lifted

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 11 points 3 months ago (5 children)

The last study I saw might have been from 18 months ago, but they found that AI costs programmers more time than they saved AND that programmers completely miscalculated the efficiency of AI, unaware that it was slower.

Whether or not AI is more efficient now, it's demonstrated that individual programmers are pretty bad at evaluating AI efficiency subjectively.

That leaves the reports of CEO's, desperate to justify layoffs from lack of work with AI, desperate to goose their stock prices by being AI-first, and the slavish business press who exclusively repeats whatever they say.

Citation definitely needed.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 5 child comments
    •
  • [–] -1 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    18 months is an eternity in terms of AI performance. Local models now are better than the frontiers models were at that moment.

    In my experience, AI automates the boring part of programming (which is actually writing the code). It leaves me able to focus on user experience, architecture, the fun stuff. Am I more productive? Maybe a little, yeah. Is it magically going to replace my whole team? Only a fool would think so.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
    •
  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    How many months have been since "in 3 months, every programmer will be out of a job due to the fast progress of AI"? At least a couple years.

    Sloppers overestimate by a huge amount both the current performance of LLMs and their improvement speed.

    The only thing that gets larger exponentially as time goes on is the cost. As predicted by actual scientific studies that said LLMs would hit a diminishing returns barrier rather quickly.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 0 points 3 months ago

    I've been a programmer for the last 15+ years, and the only constant over that time has been change. Every few years, there's a new technology that "radically simplifies" programming, such that"business people will finally be able to write the code themselves". Without fail, what ends up happening is that we build more complex systems on top of it and we still need programmers to deal with it. AI is a radical shift, yes, but it still doesn't liberate "business people" from the burden of clarifying their ideas. That is what I do, and the technology I'm using to achieve that doesn't fundamentally change that fact.

    That, and leaky abstractions. They always end up leaking, and you need someone who can understand what's going on.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago

    Whatever AI is like today, it's been demonstrated programmers wildly overestimate how much time AI saves them; meanwhile, most everyone else has a vested interest in exagerrating the efficiency of AI and there is very little media presence pushing back against or investigating AI claims.

    “The common wisdom” that AI saves a lot of time could just be to result of ignorance and delusion. I'm happy to wait for objective research before making assumptions one way or the other.

    And however efficient AI actually is, nobody wants to pay the true cost of it yet.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent