>It's incredibly frustrating arguing these same points, over and over,
quite frankly there seems to be something incredibly frustrating in your life going on, but I'm not sure that the underlying cause of whatever is weighing on your mind at the moment is that I asked "how do you know that what you are feeling is actually true, in comparison to what studies show should be true?" (rephrased, as not reasonable to quote whole post)
>From our perspective, the gains are so obvious that it really does feel like you must just be doing something fundamentally wrong not to see the same wins.
From my perspective, when I think i am experiencing something that data from multiple sources tell me is not what is actually happening I try to figure out how I can prove what I am experiencing, I reflect upon myself, have I somehow deluded myself? No? Then how do I prove it when analysis of many similar situations to my own show a different result?
You seem to think what I mean is people saying "Claude didn't help me, it wasn't worth it", no, just to clarify although I thought it was really clear, I am talking about numerous studies always being posted on HN so I'm sure you must have seen them where productivity gains from coding agents do not seem to actually show up in the work of those who use it. Studies conducted by third parties observing the work, not claims made by people performing the work.
I'm not going to go through the rest of your post, I get the urge to be insulting, especially as a stress release if you have a particularly bad time recently. But frankly, statistically speaking, my life is almost certainly significantly worse than yours, and for that reason, but not that reason alone, I will also quite confidently state without hardly any knowledge of you specifically but just my knowledge of my life and comparison of having met people throughout it, that my list dwarfs yours.
To lay it out, Im pretty firmly pro-AI.
Putting it succinctly, these kind of conversations feel weird because it's like asking whether carpenters are faster using power tools or hand tools. If you've used power tools it's obvious they make work a lot faster. Maybe there were some studies around the time power tools were introduced looking at the productivity of carpenters, if those studies had results saying the productivity gains weren't obvious in the data that means you have a problem with your study and the data you have collected (which is totally understandable, measuring imprecise things like productivity accurately is really hard). You have to look at the evidence in front of you though, try telling the guy with a chainsaw that he's actually no more productive than he was when he was using an axe and he'll laugh at you.
[dead]
This takes the cake for one of the strangest replies I've ever received on here.
I'm not sure how or indeed why you draw lines from what I said to my life situation... which is relevant how?
What I apparently did not do a good enough job of conveying is that those "data from multiple sources" get cited and then people immediately reply with "those are old studies". It's circular in the same way that arguing with anti-vax people is circular.
The difference is that unlike vaccines, it's very easy for someone to see how productive they are when using LLMs properly. It's not a subtle difference.
Hence the frustration with people who keep insisting that we're imagining our own productivity. It's not a good faith inquiry.
OK, glad to hear I was mistaken, but it certainly seemed like about halfway through your first response you went off the rails and decided to take my question as some sort of personal affront. It was not the strangest response I've had on HN, but one of the strangest. I could go through with a full analysis of why I thought "this guy is having problems", but that would take a long time and as you say you aren't I guess it isn't particularly useful.
I guess we aren't going to get anything meaningful between us on this subject, because you seem to think it is like arguing with an anti-vaxxer, which funny enough I thought the same thing,
So fine, you experience a gain, you just do, and it is so clear and evident you don't need to guard yourself against being deluded despite studies suggesting that gain is not there. That seems crazy to me, I would doubt and want to verify my gain if I read a study suggesting the gain was illusory. No meaningful convergence seems possible between needing verification and not needing verification.
I like remus' comment to your previous message; you're telling a guy with a chainsaw who is busy chopping down trees at lightning speed that he should stop and defend his daily experience against some studies that suggest tree chopping speeds are not what they seem.
At some point you just have to shrug and get back to work chopping down 3-5x more trees than you did last year.
Writing software is not chopping trees, though.
For instance, there is a lot of evidence (and intuition, frankly) to the argument that while LLM increase superficial, short-term productivity, they also cause an extreme accumulation in technical debt that may more than wipe out any initial, fast progress down the line.
If you aren't reviewing the changes its proposing, you deserve what's coming to you.