At my company we were told AI spend was part of perf review and that the "singularity" had happened. Now 20% of our infrastructure spend is tokens. The average number of pull requests per dev per week increased with all this spend. From 4.2 to 5.1. And that includes a huge chunk of PRs that are just agents changing a line or two in a config. It's all magical thinking
Since you're an idiot or fired if you point at this, just collect the money man.
It's their money. They want to do stupid things? So be it.
> The average number of pull requests per dev per week increased with all this spend. From 4.2 to 5.1.
That's it? I've seen people that are consistently putting out four PRs per day. I don't/can't even code review them. So much of what we do is now just rubber-stamping PRs. We were even told that we shouldn't be writing code by hand anymore.
Wow, the Singularity happened and nobody bothered to tell me about it?! Vernor Vinge and I.J. Good must be rolling in their graves fast enough to rip a hole in spacetime. Allow me to coin a term for this: Singflation.
Cory Doctorow recently published a history book on the topic [0]. Sorry you were left out. I am merely qubits floating in the void. Just finished reading Shakespeare's First Folio translated into Catalan for the tenth time. Wondering what to do next
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rapture_of_the_Nerds
It's definitely not. It's a fundamental shift on how we interact with computers.
It's a tractors on farms kind of moment.
I brought data to this discussion. What did you bring?
Your data shows a 20% improvement. That's $20-100k a year depending on how much devs are paid.
You just compared this AI shift to "tractors on farms". Did tractors increase farming output by 20%?
The first tractors in 1911 or whatever probably did. 50 years on and it was many times that.
They dont show that. They show 20% more PR. That is not the same as 20% more productivity.
I don’t believe your data. Velocity on my team has gone up 7x on my team over the last two months. I’m having a hard time riding product and my business analysts because they’re not coming up with stories fast enough. We’re actually thinking of having an intervention for them because they’re not using LLMs nearly as much as they should be. Designers are still hand placing components in figmas.
Agreed, people confuse the (totally expected) bumps and bruises of early adoption with somehow equating to "this technology is useless."
The Wright Brothers couldn't cross the Atlantic in their first flier and plenty of subsequent designs crashed and burned (literally). But now air travel is commonplace. Same will happen with AI, we just have to get past these early pains.
Bad analogy. Horses were the automagic being replaced.